


Inexplicable

by IndignantLemur



Category: Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Adult Believer, All hail King Dingle, Ambiguous Relationships, Bargaining, Belief is everything, Big sister saves the day, Blood and Gore, Childhood Memories, Creepy Pitch, Deal with a Devil, F/M, Fables - Freeform, Fae & Fairies, Fairy Tale Retellings, Family Bonding, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Halloween, Horror, I'm Bad At Titles, Insomnia, Mild Language, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Mythology - Freeform, Nightmares, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Púca | Pooka, Rating May Change, Seelie Court, Sibling Bonding, Slow Burn, Supernatural Elements, Supernatural contracts, Unexpected ally, Unseelie Court, What happens when you believe in the Boogeyman but not the Guardians, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2017-12-12 04:37:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 28,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/807299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IndignantLemur/pseuds/IndignantLemur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn’t the norm, for an adult to hold onto his or her Belief. In fact, such a thing almost never happened. Most children started to forget, around the end of their preteen years, and the Guardians had learned to accept that. They protected children, after all, not adults. Their strength came from the pure simplicity of a child’s Belief. Adults were too world-weary and skeptical to ever maintain such a thing on their own. It made sense that they would lose so many in the transition between the two.</p><p>Ingrid was something of an exception… not because she was special in and of herself, of course, but rather due to an odd series of events. </p><p>But one thing inevitably leads to another, and when Ingrid strikes up a fake "deal" with the Boogeyman to help her little sister with her nightmares years later, she doesn't realize that a shred of belief and permission are all the Boogeyman needs.</p><p>Belief opens many doors, including ones that probably should have stayed firmly shut. </p><p>Starts out cute, fluffy, and a bit slow, but picks up (and grows darker) quickly!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

ONE:

It wasn’t the norm, for an adult to hold onto his or her Belief. In fact, such a thing almost never happened. Most children started to forget, around the end of their preteen years, and the Guardians had learned to accept that. They protected children, after all, not adults. Their strength came from the pure simplicity of a child’s Belief. Adults were too world-weary and skeptical to ever maintain such a thing on their own. It made sense that they would lose so many in the transition between the two.

Ingrid was something of an exception… not because she was special in and of herself, of course, but rather due to an odd series of events.

It had started just after her ninth birthday, really, just as her Belief had begun to fade into adult cynicism and disenchantment. Her parents were divorcing, the fighting was a constant weight on her shoulders, and school –contrary to most other kids’ opinions- was the closest thing to a sanctuary for her.

* * *

It was December 24th and Ingrid could not sleep. School was out for the holidays, and her parents were desperately trying to pretend that they still loved each other so that their daughter could have some semblance of normality… but Ingrid wasn’t immune to the thinly veiled barbs and the subtle jabs, even if they weren’t directed at her. She’d always been too smart for her own good.

But that wasn’t the subject at hand. It was December 24th and Ingrid could not sleep.

The sounds of the world outside her window were muffled and distant, far-off traffic and sirens barely reached her ears, and the silent snowfall blanketed the world in smears of white. Skeleton-like trees bore snowflakes instead of leaves, and sleeping flowers displayed delicate icicles instead of petals. Mud and grass and concrete alike were hidden behind loose and powdery snow-banks, and ice glittered under the streetlights.

It was a peaceful scene, quiet and subdued, but it was of little help to a young girl with a restless mind.

She’d tried rolling onto her sides and stomach, had fluffed and stacked and re-fluffed her pillows, had even tried sleeping with her head at the foot of her bed. She’d tried counting sheep, and going through her multiplication tables – but that had only made her more awake, because she’d had to concentrate.

By the time it was nearing dawn, Ingrid had resorted to staring up at her popcorn-textured ceiling and counting the bumps out of sheer boredom.

And then there had been the tiny tinkling sound of a bell. Quiet at first, almost subdued… and then loudly, rattling away like a hyperactive child’s toy, followed by muffled thumps and bumps and a number of strange and unfamiliar sounds. It honestly hadn’t occurred to Ingrid that she should be frightened of strange noises in her home, in the middle of the night. She’d always been a curious child, after all, and in all of her detective books it was perfectly sensible for the protagonist to go and investigate.

So investigate she had. Ingrid had put on her fluffy purple housecoat and her silly lobster-shaped slippers, and had grabbed a flashlight, too, because all good investigators had those, right? As silently as she could, the little girl crept past the master bedroom where her mother slept, and the guest bedroom where her father slept, cleverly avoiding all of the creaky floorboards. Down the stairs, keeping to the far edges near the wall, where there was little to no creaking and a hand-rail to hang onto, she crept, and at this point Ingrid was feeling quite proud of herself for being so quiet. She hadn’t even dropped her flashlight or knocked anything over this time!

The living room had a heady aroma, half pine from the Christmas tree and half citrus and cloves from the little mandarin oranges speckled with cloves like pincushions scattered around the house. Mom did that every year, Ingrid mused to herself, and while it was certainly very nice smelling, Ingrid rather though that the oranges should be _eaten_ , not left lying about.

Stockings hung from the mantelpiece above the fireplace, bright and colourful in the otherwise neutral space. All of the colours were shades of browns and beiges and carefully chosen creams – the only non-seasonal splashes of colour stemming from pictures on the walls or tiny little knick-knacks. Usually, the space was also filled with Ingrid scattered toys and puzzles, but her father had insisted that Santa wouldn’t like it if he stepped on her Lego pieces like he did, and he might not leave her any presents if she didn’t tidy up.

Blackmail, she was sure of it – problem was, Ingrid couldn’t exactly ask Santa what he thought about the subject.

A car drove by, one with a quiet engine that didn’t make a racket like the neighbour’s noisy truck did, and the beams cast by its headlights threw shapes and shadows across the room. The Christmas lights flickered, flashing colours in different patterns, and each tiny ornament caught the lights like diamonds… Or so Ingrid thought; she wasn’t too clear on how real diamonds caught the light, but it was a popular description in many of the books she read.

Turning her attention back to investigating that little tinkling bell, Ingrid crept around the beige love-seat  of her living room, and looked around with large and curious eyes. The plate of cookies she had left out for Santa was empty –and, strangely, on the floor- and the glass of milk was empty, too, though it at least had stayed on the coffee table. Ingrid felt giddy.

And, oddly enough, it wasn’t because of the presents under the tree – though she saw several which had not been there when she and her parents had gone to sleep, and all of them were brightly wrapped and tied off with pretty ribbon bows. Quite strangely indeed, Ingrid ignored her child-like desire to pick up the boxes and try to figure out what was in them. Why? Because she was on a mission.

The little bell jingled again, closer this time.

Ingrid gripped her flashlight, half excited to discover the source of the noise, and half terrified that it might be something scary. It took her a moment to pluck up the courage to poke her head around the corner of the love-seat, but when she did…

Well.

Err.

Whatever little Ingrid had been expecting to find, it certainly hadn’t been a pointy-headed wobbly thing with a bell on one end and striped toe-less socks on the other. It was running around, tiny little arms waving in the air, and it seemed like it didn’t know if it wanted to hide amongst the brightly coloured Christmas presents, play with the shiny baubles on the tree’s low-hanging branches, or climb up the chimney. In the end, the poor thing seemed to have settled for running around in circles and flailing.

Unexpected, Ingrid allowed, doing her best to approach this like a real detective as she quietly set her flashlight down on the carpet and folded her arms. But never fear! Unexpected things happened to detectives all the time in her novels, and if they weren’t flummoxed by it, then she wouldn’t be either!

Even if she was fairly certain none of those detectives ever had to deal with a tiny thing with a pointy head running around their Christmas tree and flailing…

Well. Nothing for it, the girl supposed, and she crept forward a little.

“Hello,” She whispered, because she wasn’t supposed to be up and the funny triangle-shaped thing looked very upset. It was red and green, and that struck Ingrid as strangely fitting, given the date. 

The thing squeaked and fell over, half way between the tree and the fireplace, and the scene was so adorable that Ingrid had to giggle. It had a round little nose and big yellow eyes, with long ears that poked out of its pointy little outfit. Its hands and feet were tiny, but they looked pretty normal – no claws or feathers or anything that Ingrid could see. The little girl with grey-green eyes knelt down to have a closer look at the thing. It was kind of cute… and it smelled oddly of cookies.

More so, because it was giving her an indignant frown and jingling its bell angrily as it tried to get back on its feet, rolling back and forth like an overturned turtle.

“I’m Ingrid – who are you?” The little girl asked, because funny-looking pointy creatures in her living room were no excuse for poor manners. Mommy said manners were very important, and Ingrid thought that since her mother was right about most things, she was probably right about that stuff, too.

The creature flailed its arms and legs and somehow managed to use that momentum to swing back into its feet. It dusted itself off and straightened out its little green belt before staring at her strangely.

“Can’t you speak?” Ingrid asked after a long moment of waiting for a response.

The pointy-headed fellow shook his head from side to side, looking put-out.

“Oh. Well… can you write?” Grey-green eyes looked around the living room, with its gaudy Christmas décor and snow-frosted windows. Surely, she had a paper and pencil somewhere! After all, all good detectives did.

Another shake, this time more emphatic... and then, suddenly, a spark of inspiration appeared in those googly-yellow eyes, and the creature tottered away before Ingrid could think to stop it.

“Hey! Where are you going?” Ingrid called after it, only to cringe and remember that she was supposed to be sleeping.  There was a sudden clattering sound from the other side of the blue-grey loveseat, painfully loud in the otherwise silent room. Freezing, the little girl listened for any signs of her parents stirring. She didn’t know precisely what was so bad about being awake on Christmas Eve, except that her parents got tired of trying to explain it to her a few years back and just insisted that she’d be in trouble if she didn’t go to sleep.

Thankfully, the only sounds to be heard were those of the tiny brass bell at the top of the creature’s pointy body-shirt, and the quiet clacking of plastic on plastic on the other side of one of the great big loveseats.

Heaving a sigh of relief, Ingrid stood up and followed the sound of the tiny little bell until she came across the creature.

Somehow, the little devil had found the Scrabble board game that she had hidden under one of the loveseats (her parents fought over spelling and “legal” words too much) and it was tottering around with big plastic tabs and laying them down on the off-white carpet. It almost looked as if the little guy was spelling something out. At least, Ingrid assumed the creature was a boy. A girl would be prettier, right?

Curious, Ingrid padded over in her Hello Kitty pajamas and fluffy bunny slippers, and sat down nearby.

Slowly, almost painfully, words began to form in wobbly letters on the floor.

‘ALF’ said one cluster of tablets.

‘DINGLE’ said another.

‘DINGLELITTLELOSTCANDINGLEGOHOMENOW’ said the largest block, and it took Ingrid a moment to decipher just what the little creature was trying to say.

Hopeful yellow eyes stared up at her, as tiny hangs wrung together and tiny toes nervously wiggled amongst the carpet fibres.

Ingrid suddenly felt very sad. “Your name is Dingle?”

Dingle nodded.

“And you’re lost?” No wonder the little guy looked so upset. Ingrid didn’t think being lost was a very good feeling at the best of times, but being lost in a place even the low-set coffee table was bigger than you must be horrible.

Another nod and a watery look came over those big eyes.

“What’s an alf?”

Dingle frowned up at her and then pointed at the word in question again, as if that explained everything.

“Yes, alf. What is it?”

The tiny fellow stomped one of his feet and pointed to himself.

“You’re alf? But you said your name was Dingle.” Now Ingrid was just confused.

Spindly little arms flailed in a show of frustration just as the pieces fit together in Ingrid’s mind. “Ohhh! _An_ alf! Your name is Dingle and you’re an elf!”

And then, a gasp of realization. “You’re one of Santa’s Elves!”

Dingle gave her a look that spoke volumes – a sort of ‘better-late-than-never’ expression that made Ingrid feel as though she probably should have figured that out much earlier… Which was unfair, really. How was she supposed to know? Ingrid had always thought that Santa’s Elves were bigger and could talk and looked like the ones in the stop-animation movies.

“But you can’t be here!” Ingrid protested with a furrowed brow. Her little heart was pounding in excitement; Elves were real! Santa was real! Oh, her friends were never going to believe her! “You’re supposed to be at the North Pole!”

Dingle latched onto the name like a lifeline, nodding vigorously.

Something occurred to Ingrid as she knelt before the tiny Elf, something which led to all kinds of problems. “Do you… can you get home from here?”

The poor thing looked like he was going to cry.

“Oh no!” Ingrid rushed, panicked by the look on the little creature’s face. “Don’t cry! I’ll help you! Santa’s going to notice that you’re gone, right? All we have to do is send him a letter to tell him where you are!”

And, of course, that is precisely what Ingrid did. She wrote a very polite letter with her nicest coloured pencils and in her neatest spelling and even included a drawing of Dingle to show that he really was there, and asked her parents to help her send it to the North Pole.

It was simple, and short, and to the point, and Ingrid was fairly certain Santa would be able to read it. Sometimes her father complained that her writing was too messy.

When her parents asked why on earth she’d want to send another letter to Santa, Ingrid smiled and said, “Because I want to say thank you!”

For the first time in months, her parents shared a fond look.

All the while, Dingle stayed in her room, entertained in by her toys and fed with a hidden supply of short-bread cookies. Ingrid had made him a bed out of a shoebox, a towel, and some small blankets from when she was a baby, and set it up beside her own much larger bed. She snuck him a tiny glass of milk or juice whenever she could, and even shared her chocolate orange with him.

Dingle hoarded chocolate nearly as much as her mother. Sometimes, when Ingrid could sneak him a ginger cookie or a chocolate, he made her little aluminium foil presents from the wrappers. They were always odd, disfigured-looking things, shaped like rough approximations of trees or bows or stars. Ingrid always made a point of displaying them on her dresser. Dingle always did a little happy-dance when she did that, and it was hard not to giggle.

They played games, built things out of Lego and tiny fortresses out of cardboard, construction paper, and a liberal amount of tape. Everything was Dingle-sized, of course.

In the days after Christmas while Ingrid and Dingle waited for Santa to come and collect his wayward Elf, things between Ingrid’s parents worsened… and Ingrid didn’t really notice. She spent all of her time with Dingle, sometimes wandering around outside with him or playing pretend-games. Once, she made him a little yellow paper crown and built him a castle, and he was King Dingle for a day.

In hindsight, she probably should have felt bad about lying to her parents, but Ingrid was a shrewd child; helping her new friend was important, and her parents wouldn’t understand if she tried to explain it, so she was saving everyone a lot of trouble by keeping quiet.

To be fair, the letter did include a note of thanks, so that part wasn’t a lie, at least.

For a few days, it was fun. Ingrid didn’t have to sit in her room and pretend she didn’t hear her parents shouting at each other. She wasn’t quite so lonely, either, with Dingle to talk to and to go on adventures with. The sound of a little brass bell became associated with comfort and a degree of solace. And Dingle was endlessly entertained by the sketches she did of him – eating cookies, pretending to be King Dingle, climbing things, trying to draw with a pencil nearly the same size as him.

The day Ingrid woke up and found a letter in the shoebox where Dingle should have been broke her heart.

_‘Dear Ingrid,_

_Thank you for looking after Dingle for me – the other Elves missed him very much. He’s back home now, safe and sound!_

_See you next year!  
North’_

At the bottom of the letter, with its neat little letters and empty statements, was a drawing. It was clumsy, and misshapen, and a blur of bright colours. The drawing was of a little girl (possibly –or a peachy blob with red fuzz) and a point triangle with a big yellow ball on his head, and they were holding hands. In awkward and leaning letters, someone had scribbled, ‘BYE’ next to the childish drawing, and there was even a tiny –lumpy, misshapen, possibly congenitally-defective- heart in bright pink.

Ingrid pondered the signature at the bottom of the short and vapid letter for years – but she held onto it nonetheless, to remind herself of a tiny little Elf who had gotten lost in her living room.

And if that hadn’t been enough, tiny little brass bells and aluminium-foil shapes appeared in the toes of her stocking for years to come. 


	2. Two

TWO:

Two years after The Dingle Incident, as Ingrid liked to call it, the eleven-year old girl often reasoned that, if Santa’s Elves existed, then if followed that Santa existed as well. After all, they two were fairly strongly connected, right? If Santa didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be called Santa’s Elves.

If inexplicable eggs appeared in strange places well after her parents had grown tired of setting up egg hunts of their own, then it followed that maybe, just _maybe_ there was something to the Easter Bunny, too, right? That seemed reasonable, didn’t it?

The Sandman had to exist, too, of course – where else did good dreams and the crusts in the corners of your eyes come from? That was a no-brainer as far as Ingrid was concerned, and the child in her scoffed at idea that some people thought otherwise.

The Tooth Fairy, though… that was a hard one. It had been a little while since Ingrid had lost any teeth, after all, and aside from quarters and all that, there really wasn’t too much evidence of the mysterious Fairy. Maybe she existed, the almost-preteen allowed, but some form of empirical evidence was needed.

Of course, Ingrid never shared any of these observations with her friends; they were all about boy bands and trying to grow up too fast. All of them complained about how their parents still treated them like children and didn’t trust them to look after their selves, or how they wished adults would take them more seriously. None of them believed anymore, and Ingrid didn’t particularly feel up to being accused of being gullible or childish for her own beliefs.

But it occurred to the girl, as she thought and pondered and reasoned, that if good guys like Santa existed, then bad guys had to as well. Every action had an equal and opposite reaction, after all – or so her dad’s old physics textbooks claimed.

So… it followed, Ingrid would always hesitantly begin, that bad things like the Boogeyman had to exist to, and other things like scary ghosts and maybe even monsters.

Ingrid had never been especially prone to bad dreams, but she’d had her share. During the worst part of her parents’ divorce, Ingrid had hardly slept. Her nightmares had been terrible and heartbreaking –scenes of both of her parents leaving her, because it was somehow all her fault, of them forgetting her, of them marrying other people and having other kids and not loving her anymore—

Sometimes, Ingrid still had those dreams, even though she lived with just her mother now and her father sent her postcards every other month. The ones about her mother remarrying and loving her new kids more were the worst of the lot, naturally, but when Ingrid had asked her mother, one tearful evening, about it, her mother had been horrified at the very suggestion.

Now, Ingrid’s mother went out of her way to reassure Ingrid that she was still loved. It helped… but sometimes Ingrid wondered about the hypothetical new children.

Ingrid was a smart child, but that meant that sometimes she missed the obvious things in favour of seeking out the bigger picture or the hidden details. It showed in her essays for school, and never failed to exasperate her teachers.

It never occurred to Ingrid that bad dreams and things like the Boogeyman might be connected. When she thought of the Boogeyman, she thought of creepy things under her bed or in her closet. Nightmares just didn’t factor in, really.

“Honey,” A warm and familiar voice drew Ingrid out of her thoughts.

It was her mother, Dahlia Price – she never had given up her maiden name, Ingrid recalled- and she was smiling that warm but nervous smile that meant she had something she wanted to tell her daughter, but wasn’t sure how to begin.

Dahlia Price was a very pretty woman, healthy and strong in her late thirties, with high cheekbones and beautiful sloe-eyes with just the faintest beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners behind slim wire-framed glasses. She was not the delicate sort of pretty that Ingrid saw in the princesses of her movies sometimes, but the strong and motherly kind of pretty – like the queens. Where Ingrid had inherited her grey-green eyes from her father’s side, her red hair came very much from her mother’s half of the gene pool, Dahlia herself sporting a full head of curly ginger locks.

Ingrid smiled up at her mother, and patted the carpet beside her. “Yeah, mom?”

Dahlia smiled back and sat down, cross-legged, next to her daughter, watching as Ingrid put her abandoned novel aside and waited patiently for her mother to begin.

“Honey, I wanted to ask you about something very important.” Dahlia began, and she wasn’t looking at Ingrid as her child, but as something close to an equal – a child old enough and clever enough to be asked about serious things. “It’s been a little while since your father and I divorced, and I wanted to know what you thought about maybe having a step-dad someday. Not right now – but someday.”

Oh.

Ingrid frowned, brow furrowing as she thought about it. Some part of her wailed and rebelled at the thought of step-parents, who were always nasty and mean people in her books, and the thought of step-children played heavily on her insecurities. Anxiety rose up before Ingrid could stop it, and Ingrid saw her mother’s face fall.

The adult in Ingrid seized upon that expression, and guilt rose up in anxiety’s place. It would be selfish of her to say no.  Maybe her mom was lonely? Maybe her mom was having problems making ends meet, like Jessica’s dad, and a step-dad would help? Maybe he’d be a nice step-dad and they wouldn’t fight and shout at each other all the time?

Aimee’s mom was a step-mom, her mind supplied helpfully, and Mrs. Higgins the Second was very nice, so maybe it wasn’t like the books made out…?

“Okay.” Ingrid said, her mind made up suddenly, and she felt proud at the surprised and pleased look on her mother’s freckled face. Then, the little girl raised her finger, a mirror image of her mother when Dahlia was about to put conditions down on a privilege. “But only if he’s nice and doesn’t shout and makes you not-lonely. And he can’t make me pick up my Lego until I’m done building my castle, okay? I have all the pieces I need in piles so I don’t lose them, and that took a while to do, so-”

 Warm and soft arms enfolded the little girl, and the soft scent of jasmine and vanilla filled the air around Ingrid as she wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck.

“Oh, honey,” Dahlia said in a soft voice that wasn’t quite sad but not very happy either, and that was all she would say for a long time, holding her daughter close and gently rocking the pair of them back and forth.

Ingrid pretended not to feel terrified of the idea of step-sisters and step-brothers, and hugged her mother as tightly as she could.


	3. Three

THREE:

His name was Peter Olesson, and he was her mother’s third boyfriend in two years.

He was different than the others – who were all big and strong or very professional-looking, like important business men. Peter Olesson was thin and kind of nerdy-looking. He had thick-framed glasses, short, sandy-blonde hair, and he wore sweater-vests. He didn’t talk loudly, and he didn’t talk to Ingrid like she was too little to understand the answers to her questions, and he always asked her if it was okay if he borrowed her mother for coffee or tea. He drove a Prius, and he had fluffy orange cat named Billy.

More importantly, he had a replica of Bilbo’s sword, Sting, hanging on the wall in his office at the local university. He had wanted a replica of Gandalf’s sword, Glamdring, but it hadn’t been available at the time.

Peter Olesson was a Medieval Studies professor, and Ingrid liked him.

“Hey, do you like Vikings?” Peter was asking Ingrid, and he had an excited sort of grin on his face that made her mother do a warm-and-fuzzy smile. He knelt down to talk to her, because he thought it was rude to tower over her, and he didn’t baby-voice her, either.

Ingrid was pretty sure Peter was going to be the best step-dad ever.

“I do! They’re so cool and they have awesome swords and brooches and axes and helmets!” Ingrid gushed, thirteen-years-old and already in love with history and mythology. “And their ships were awesome! Did you read that article I emailed you about the huge ship they found in Denmark? It was neat!”

“Wanna see something cool?” Peter asked, if unnecessarily, and he was chuckling at her enthusiasm. Vikings were his speciality, and he’d written his thesis on Viking archaeology several years back.

Ingrid nodded emphatically, and Peter cautioned, “Okay, but you have to promise to handle it very carefully. It’s very old and very delicate.”

Ingrid’s eyes went wide, and Dahlia chuckled as Peter brought out a wide cardboard box from his messenger bag and set it down on the corner of their living room coffee-table, closest to Ingrid.

There, nestled on a cushion and kept in a little plastic bag to protect it from the elements, semi-circular brooch, with elegantly curled endings and zigzags had been carved into the metal. The pin was attached to the center of the semi-circle by a little round joint, and even that was decorated with surprising detail.

“It’s so pretty!” Ingrid exclaimed, because it was. Time had aged the brooch and given it a fine patina, but it was remarkably well preserved, even to her untrained eyes, and well-made besides. Looking up at the professor, the thirteen-year-old asked in her politest tones, “May I pick it up?”

Peter grinned, green eyes lit up with amusement. “Of course you can! It’s for you, silly! Just be careful not to drop it or get it wet, okay?”

It was unfortunate, in some respects, that Peter was not as big as some of her mother’s previous boyfriends, because he was knocked clean over by Ingrid’s answering tackle-hug.

“Whoa! I guess you like it, huh?” The professor joked from the floor, and he was laughing as Ingrid clung to his middle and thanked him over and over and over again. “Dahlia, you never told me your daughter played rugby!”

“She doesn’t!” Ingrid’s mother was giggling and trying very hard not to, one hand pressed against her mouth and the other against her stomach as she tried and failed to stifle her laughter.

Out of the corner of her eye, Ingrid saw a look on her mother’s face that she had not seem in some time. Her mother was happy – uncontrollable grin, flushed cheeks, and bright eyes broadcasted it for anyone to see. And Professor Peter Olesson did that.

Ingrid was seventeen when Dahlia Price and Peter Olesson finally married. For their honey-moon, Peter took Dahlia _and_ her daughter to the world premiere of The Hobbit, and then on a tour of New Zealand.

Three years later, little Madeline Olesson was born.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's a bit short - sorry!


	4. Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ingrid decides that her new sister looks like a potato.

FOUR:

The first time Ingrid saw Madeline, she had been horrified. Babies weren’t cute, like she thought they would be. They looked like pink, wrinkly potatoes with limbs. _Loud_ pink, wrinkly potatoes.

Actually, Ingrid thought, they were kind of hideous.

“Is she supposed to look like a potato?” Ingrid asked dubiously as Peter beckoned her over to show his step-daughter her new sister. Dahlia and Peter burst out laughing, Dahlia’s laughter tired but no less hearty for it. One of the nurses tidying up nearby ducked her head to hide a smile.

“Yes, honey,” Dahlia explained with a chuckle from her nest of blankets on the hospital bed. “All babies look like that at first – you did, too!”

Her mother looked exhausted. Proud, but exhausted. Ingrid knew the basics of childbirth – she had always done very well in her science-based classes- but there was a difference between knowing what happened and being around to witness it. Or, rather, hear it.

It had been like a horror movie soundtrack, only without the visuals to accompany it; disconcerting and more than a little off-putting… and kind of hilarious, when Peter had fainted and had been carried out into the hall by two of the nurses on hand.

“Ingrid,” Peter began with a beaming smile, the smile of a first-time father, despite his pale face and the shaky after effects of fainting from shock. “This is Madeline.”

The Potato squalled, suddenly and surprisingly loudly, and continued to do so – for no apparent reason, as far as Ingrid could see.

Ingrid frowned, suddenly a bit concerned at how wobbly her step-father seemed to be. “Are you sure you should be holding her? I mean, you fainted half an hour ago and you’re kind of wobbly, and I’m not sure I’m okay with you dropping my new sister.”

Dahlia grinned, and she and Peter shared a look over the shrieking newborn that Ingrid couldn’t even begin to pretend to understand and then—

And then, suddenly, Madeline was in her arms, tiny, wrinkly potato that she was, with her tuft of pale blonde hair and her scrunched up little face. Wrapped in swaddling clothes and soft blankets with little ducks on them, and… wow. She was a big sister. How had that not hit her before now?

“Hey, Potato.” Ingrid greeted softly. Dahlia made a noise of despair – Ingrid had taken to nicknaming people and things- and Peter rolled his eyes fondly. Ingrid didn’t notice.

Madeline stopped crying. Not instantly, not as though someone had snapped their fingers and performed a magic trick… but gradually, growing quieter and quieter until tiny hands found the ends of Ingrid’s braided hair and decided they would make a decent substitute for a stuffy.

There was no sudden epiphany, no overwhelming sense of maternal instinct. It was a quiet moment, as Ingrid stood there and stared at Madeline, with her tiny fingernails and round little nose.

And in that quiet moment, the redheaded sister made a decision.

This little potato of a girl was going to have the best damn big sister ever.

* * *

 

All of the kids on the block wanted to see the baby when Ingrid’s family returned from the hospital. Dahlia was exhausted and not quite ready to be up and about, so Ingrid and Peter took charge of looking after Madeline. It wasn’t exactly easy – infants are loud, messy things with inexplicable mood swings and typically came utterly lacking any sort of instruction manual.

Ingrid wasn’t very good at feeding Madeline, because, honestly, she wouldn’t have wanted to eat that mushy stuff either. She wasn’t so great at changing Madeline’s diapers, either, because… well. Because. And Ingrid was actually pretty terrible when it came to putting Madeline to bed, because Ingrid was pretty sure that the Potato honestly wasn’t that tired.

But if there was one thing the twenty-year-old _was_ good at, it was getting Madeline to stop crying.

So, naturally, Ingrid was the one in charge of introducing the neighbourhood kids –carefully, and with Peter hovering like a mother-hen- to the little Potato.

Jamie, Pippa, and a little blonde boy with a nervous stutter and huge glasses were the first to appear with a fluffy pink teddy bear in hand. Ingrid knew them only in the vaguest sense of the word – they seemed like decent enough kids, and they always said hello to her when they saw her around town. Madeline hadn’t been too sure about the kids and their excited voices, but she seemed to like the stuffy well enough, so Ingrid had stepped out into the warm summer air and knelt down on the front porch for the kids to have a better look.

“She doesn’t like loud noises,” Ingrid cautioned. “And she hasn’t opened her eyes yet, so she can’t see you.”

The kids stared, fascinated by the bundle in Ingrid’s arms, and Pippa cooed when Madeline stared mouthing the teddy bear’s ear. Jamie was nattering on about Changling babies – and Ingrid had to refrain from correcting his sources, because mythology was a bit of a hobby of hers. Still, he was a nice enough kid.

“Ingrid!” Peter called from inside the house. “It’s time for Maddy’s bath!”

It was hard not to chuckle at the disappointed looks on the trio’s faces, but bath time was bath time, after all. 


	5. Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ingrid does something a bit daft.

FIVE:

Maddy was six years old, and the absolute terror on her face was heartbreaking.

It was the little girl’s first thunderstorm –or, at least, the first one she could remember- and no amount of cuddling and coddling would console the frightened child, despite Dahlia and Peter’s best efforts. At length, Ingrid had stepped in, clad in a tank top and some fluffy pajama bottoms, and took the little girl into her arms so that her poor parents could sleep.

“Hey, Potato.” Ingrid soothed as small limbs wrapped around her neck and waist and the elder of the two carried the younger back to her room. Maddy had her nose buried in Ingrid’s neck, her fists in Ingrid’s loose hair, and there was a suspicious damp patch forming on Ingrid’s shirt-shoulder. “So what’s this all about then?”

Leaving the little girl’s bedroom door open a crack, so that the light from the hallway filtered through, Ingrid carried her sister to her small bed with its dishevelled covers and pillows thrown askew. She shifted until she could fold her much longer limbs beneath her and cradled the little girl in her lap. One long-fingered hand stroked honey-blonde hair, while the other was wrapped around Maddy’s back for support.

Madeline said something, but it was muffled and fragmented with frightened sobs.

“Are you scared of the storm?” Ingrid asked patiently. Somehow, she always found it in her to be a well of patience and serenity around her little sister, even when such a thing couldn’t be mustered for her own boyfriends. “Or did the Boogeyman give you a fright?”

Maddy flinched, and then nodded vigorously into Ingrid’s shoulder.

Interesting…

“Taters, did you see the Boogeyman?” Ingrid asked suddenly.

The blonde child whined; a sad, mewling sort of noise usually reserved for cats when their kittens were hungry.

“And where was he?”

Maddy shook her head and spoke again, words still muffled but decidedly petulant. Petulant was good, Ingrid thought. She could work with petulant.

 “Was there English in there?” Ingrid inquired lightly, and with some tugging and prodding she managed to get the little girl to turn her head slightly, eyes squeezed shut.

“Makin’ fun of me.” Maddy accused, and her voice was watery and hoarse.

Lightning flashed and thunder crashed, casting sketchy silhouettes across the pink and yellow walls of Madeline’s room. The wind whistled and howled, and the wood of their old house creaked and moaned, and this, more than the lightning, seemed to frighten Maddy the most.

The air was heavy with the scent of damp soil, ozone, and something old and musty – like Peter’s old textbooks, only more so.

“Why would I do that?”

“Daddy says Boogeyman’s not real.” Maddy muttered, clearly hurt by her father’s disbelief. “And mummy says m’being silly.”

Ahhh. That would do it, the redhead thought to herself. Out loud, the elder commented, “Well, that’s just not true, is it? Of course the Boogeyman is real; you can’t be scared of nothing, now, can you?”

It was oddly cold in Maddy’s room, given that her windows were firmly shut and there were no drafts that Ingrid could detect. Something about that _bothered_ Ingrid on some subconscious, instinctive level.

“Now, where was the Boogeyman?” Ingrid prodded gently. “It’s okay, you can tell me.”

“Closet.” Was the mumbled response, as tiny fists wiped tears from big hazel eyes.

Naturally, Ingrid thought with a wry smile… and then she had an idea. “Hey, Maddy – go sit in the hallway for a bit, okay? I’ma talk to the Boogeyman and see if I can’t do something about this.”

And that… that was how one of Ingrid’s less intelligent decisions came about.

Truthfully, Ingrid’s Belief was fading, even with the countless bells and foil-shapes – but that was not due solely to time. She had joined the military as a medic, not too long after Maddy had been born, had toured in the Middle East for nearing on six years… it was hard to really and truly Believe, after all the things she had seen.

“Stay put, Taters,” Ingrid mock-ordered, knowing full well that the little girl would have her ear pressed against the door as soon as the elder turned her back.

With Maddy seated in the middle of the hall, with her favourite stuffy and blanket, Ingrid went about turning all of the lights in Maddy’s room off, closing the door quietly and even going to far as to tug Maddy’s nightlight out of the wall socket. It was cold – cold enough that Ingrid could see her own breath in what little moonlight shone through the windows of her little sister’s room…

The hallway had been perfectly warm.

Unnerved, the redhead tugged the transparent curtains open, so that at least there was some degree of light in the room. As she turned to face the closet, she could have sworn that she saw the shadows shift, but further examination revealed nothing.

That was normal – she’d learned that early on, during her training. Shadows played tricks, particularly when you were tired or stressed.

Still… something like adrenaline thrummed in her blood, like an electric undercurrent that made her hyperaware of her environment, and it set her nerves on edge even as she grasped the closet doorknob and pulled the door open. The closet itself was filled with surprisingly neatly organized clothes and toys – Maddy had always been a very neat child, even at her young age. One of the hangers was swinging, a horrid metallic scraping sounding out with each pass, and Ingrid felt her pulse spike for a moment before she reasoned that the air currents caused by opening the door could easily have set the hanger off.

Lightning flashed, casting jagged and sharp shadows across the walls. The floorboards creaked, and Ingrid’s skin _crawled_.

“Right then.” Ingrid said suddenly, if only to hear the sound of her own voice and draw a little courage from that. Purposefully, Ingrid walked over to the windows and the narrow window-seat below them, folding her legs underneath her as she rested her back against the cold wall, situating herself well within the square patches of moonlight cast by the window pane.

“So… Boogeyman.” Ingrid began, and then she wondered just how exactly did one go about talking to an infamous childhood monster? Mr. Boogeyman? Sir? Was there something special she needed to do?

Oh, to hell with it, Ingrid thought recklessly. She was here now, wasn’t she? Might as well give it a shot.

“Regarding my sister… May I have a word with you?” Ingrid asked the empty room politely, trying not to watch how her breath curled and swirled in the abnormally cold air of her little sister’s room. When silence answered her, Ingrid offered an apologetic, “If there’s a correct way to address you, I’m afraid I don’t know it, but I _do_ know that you exist.”

Sort of.

The Cynic in her scoffed and muttered that this was a waste of time – that there was no way this would ever work, and five minutes from now she’d get up and leave, feeling very foolish. The Believer in her, though… the Believer was a bundle of nerves, fear and excitement and more than a little adrenaline bundled together as she just _waited_ for something to happen.

Her shoulders were tensing up, so Ingrid made a show of shrugging, and continued in her best nonchalant voice, “If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll be taking my sister’s nightmares for a little while – say six months- so the poor thing can get a decent sleep for a change.”

Maddy would be listening at the door, after all, and half of this sort of thing was psychology, wasn’t it? If Maddy didn’t believe she’d have nightmares for six months then she wouldn’t – behold the power of a child’s mind!

A harsh wind howled, rushing along the sides of the old house with such ferocity that the windows rattled violently and even the lights in the halls, dimly visible from under the door, flickered ominously. The wind that managed to press through the tiny cracks between the windows and the walls, though broken seals and tiny openings, whistled and shrieked unnaturally, and old floorboards creaked loudly as the wind buffeted the side of her family home. The moonlight was faint, masked by a cloud now, and the shadows grew longer and darker for it.

The suddenness of the gust, the sheer _volume_ of the clamour in the otherwise silent and tomb-like room, provoked a startled noise, just barely muffled in the back of Ingrid’s throat as her control failed and her muscles jumped.

Irrationally, Ingrid was inclined to believe the Believer in her when it pointed out that she had probably offended the Boogeyman in that calm and matter-of-fact way that children did when they thought something was obvious. The cynic in her was oddly quiet.

“We can negotiate!” Ingrid felt the words tumble out, tentative and faltering, before she could stop to think about what she was doing. “No reason why something can be worked out, right?”

An even harsher gust of wind whipped by, and the rattling and creaking that came with it grated at her nerves in a way that didn’t make sense. Even the whistling of the wind bothered her, like some faint screaming in her ears – and from the darkness she swore she could see _eyes_ , and they were too-bright and too-yellow and _too close_ \--

Screams, real screams, echoed in her mind as her heart seized at the touch of unadulterated fear, as her lungs became inflexible and made of steel, and her rib cage of broken shards of glass, and Ingrid _could  hear them dying_ —

The moment was over almost as soon as it began, but for Ingrid it might as well have gone on for _years_. Her heart hammered a frantic tattoo in her chest, hard and painful, like it was trying to break out of her chest, and her lungs were starved for air. A thin layer of sweat had appeared over her shaking limbs, skin gone clammy and pale, and it made the cold air of the room that much harsher.

Ingrid wasn’t sitting, cool and composed anymore. Somehow, she had ended up curled up on her side, hands clutching at her skull through her hair, her body gasping and heavy for air on autopilot and her limbs trembling so much as to be useless. They failed her when she tried to straighten herself, to stand – once, twice, three times before she gave up and just stayed as she was.

She tasted blood in her mouth and for the life of her she could not tear her eyes away from the shadowy corner before her - the shadows where the eyes had been. No! Where she had _thought_ she had seen eyes-  were dark and devoid of anything she might have seen. Or thought she’d seen.

It was a long moment before Ingrid mustered the will to pull herself to her feet on limbs that wobbled but held firm under her weight, and a longer moment still before she thought she could put on a cheerful face for Maddy.

The Believer in her was in hysterics.  The Cynic stood atop a mountain of psychology textbooks and wrung its hands.

The light of the hallway was blinding.

“Hey, kiddo – why don’t we stay in my room tonight? Your room’s pretty cold.”

The smile felt strained and brittle on her face.

Madeline didn’t notice. 


	6. Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All actions have consequences.

SIX:

Over the following week, Madeline’s nightmares lessened – in both frequency and intensity. The differences were subtle at first, but they grew more obvious each day. Maddy was happier, more energetic, and more focused in school. When her schoolmates visited, they remarked on how Maddy must be feeling better now, and how she was a lot funnier now. Peter and their mother grew a little less stressed, a little less worried, as she dark shadows under Maddy’s big hazel-green eyes grew fainter and fainter.

The house seemed so much brighter when Maddy was her normal, happy self.

If Ingrid’s nightmares got a touch worse or a bit more frequent, then, well, wasn’t that an odd coincidence? She was stressed, after all, and still undergoing mandatory therapy now that her service was done. Her therapist liked to bring up the really horrible stuff, the really and truly terrible things, in an attempt to try to help Ingrid push through it.

It really didn’t help that much.

Then, of course, there was the fact that she was living with her parents for the time being. The financial burden on Peter and her mother was unfair, especially with Maddy growing up so quickly. More and more, Ingrid felt a sort of subconscious pressure to move out (and the sooner the better) so she wouldn’t be quite so much of a bother.

In her nightm—in her _dreams_ , her parents threw her out without any warning, said terrible things about what a burden she was and what a mess she was.  Maddy said the cruelest things, though… things about how she was never there for Maddy, never around to watch Maddy grow up because she was on the other side of the world doing and seeing terrible things. The streets in her dreams were dark and dangerous, full of unseen threats and danger in every direction, and even though she knew it was a dream and that she was asleep, Ingrid could _feel_ the hairs on the back of her neck rising. Bullets from unseen enemies whipped by, narrow misses that set her heart on overdrive. Screams of pain sounded nearby, screams of someone wounded who needed her help, who needed her there, but no matter how hard she tried she just couldn’t find---

Ingrid’s therapist suspected she wasn’t adjusting well to civilian life.

Ingrid tended to agree.

Maddy kept looking at her in a quiet, wide-eyed sort of awe as the days flew by. Ingrid didn’t like it – didn’t really know what she could have done to deserve such a look from the little girl- and it made her distinctly uncomfortable.

“Taters, why do you keep looking at me like that?” Ingrid finally asked one rainy Sunday. The end credits for Iron Man were rolling down the screen of their TV, the two sisters lounging together on the loveseat of their living room. Maddy was sleepy, and it was getting a little late, but Ingrid wanted to know.

“Like what?” The little girl asked, rubbing at the corners of her eyes with her fists and yawning.

Ingrid made a vague gesture with her hands, trying to figure out how she could explain. Eventually, she offered lamely, “Like… I did something really awesome.”

Maddy blinked. Jade-green eyes, framed in long lashes and set in a heart-shaped face, stared up at her in the dim light with a bemused expression in them. Maddy was going to be a heart-breaker someday, but for now she was oddly solemn when she answered her elder sister.

“You stood up to the Boogeyman for me.” The words were simple, spoken as if they should have been obvious, as if that was some great feat that deserved praise and reward.

After a very long moment, broken only by the music that accompanied the movie’s credits, Ingrid snorted and ruffled her half-sister’s hair. “Of course I did. I’m your big sister; that’s my job.”

Because, really, what else could she say?

Ingrid cast her eyes about the living room she had grown up with. The colours were still careful neutrals, but somehow they didn’t seem quite so bland anymore. A vase of flowers  decorated the coffee table, bright splashes of colour that brought life into the room, and an abstract horror of a clashing colours on what was supposed to be a carpet had been brought in to “liven things up” – Peter, it turned out, had very odd tastes when it came to art. Personally, Ingrid thought it was hideous.

There were more pictures on the wall, too. The people in the pictures were happier, too, than Ingrid remembered from her childhood.

“You didn’t have to, though.” Maddy said suddenly, breaking Ingrid’s reverie. Her expression was serious, strangely so for such a light-hearted child, and her gaze was firm. “Not even Gracie’s big sister did that for her – and Gracie’s big sister is _really_ nice.”

Whoever the devil Gracie was, Ingrid thought in bemusement.

“Honey, of course I did! I’m your big sister. It really is my job, you know -  I signed a contract and everything!” The elder of the two teased. “And Gracie’s big sister can’t be that nice if she won’t even try to protect Gracie from the Boogeyman, can she?”

Maddy wrinkled her nose.

“No you didn’t!”

Ingrid grinned and shook her head.

* * *

 

The nightmares began to change, after that evening. They became less like compilations of the horrors she had seen, of failures and situations she couldn’t control as they spiralled into absolute chaos. Dying comrades, wounded civilians, small children caught in the crossfire… all of those began to feature less and less in her night-time dreaming, replaced with something unnameable, unknowable. She started seeing grey and desolate places in the depths of the world, where sunlight was faint and strained to reach. She saw a maze of stone and marble, with steel cages suspended from chains as old as the world itself, and it was a place of uncanny silence. Nothing moved, nothing breathed – not in that place. Shadows rose and fell with tricks of the light, writhed when she wasn’t looking at them…

Instead of waking up in a cold sweat, Ingrid awoke from those dreams unsettled, goose-bumps trailing along her arms as spider-like shivers crawled down her spine. Each night, the dreams grew more vivid, until she could feel textures and temperatures in her dreams – the smooth grain of carved, cold marble, the rough and unfinished walls of some naturally occurring stone Ingrid didn’t recognize… The feather-light touches along her arms and legs of shadows she could almost swear were _alive_. ..

Sometimes, she could feel her skin crawl, even in her sleep, when she thought she saw lamp-like and unnerving  yellow-grey eyes watching her from the deepest of the shadows in that strange dream-place.

She rarely felt rested anymore.  No matter how long she slept, the bags under her eyes grew darker and larger, like bruises, and there was no disguising her slowed reactions, her inability to concentrate.

Ingrid’s therapist prescribed sleeping pills.

They didn’t help.

If anything, the pills made the dreams worse. They felt like they lasted even longer, in the strange way that time passes in dreams, and seemed more… solid, Ingrid supposed the word was. More real. Wasn’t that a strange thing, for dreams to feel more and more real? Ingrid had rarely had dreams that were memorable or intense or even particularly articulate, even as a child. Her dreams had always been vague and fuzzy things, full of symbolism she couldn’t even begin to guess at.

Not so, now.

It had only been a matter of time before Ingrid finally snapped.

“What do you _want_ from me!?” Ingrid finally blurted out in utter exasperation, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling above her bed. “This is ridiculous! Is a good night’s sleep too much to ask for or what?”

Ingrid made a mental note not to mention that she’d been talking to herself to her therapist.

She’d been talking to herself, of course, to her infuriating brain – surely the sole culprit of such bizarre dreams. Or maybe she had been talking to some unfathomable god of sleep and cat naps. Hell, if the Ceiling Penguins had the power to grant a good nap, they’d do in a pinch, too!

Either way, Ingrid hadn’t really been talking to anyone in particular but… well, words were tricky things, weren’t they?

* * *

 

The voice was low and smooth, but there was a sharp quality to it, too - the kind that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. The cadence of the voice was slow and particular, in the manner of someone who chooses their words carefully and with consideration. People like that tended to be dangerous, in her experience.

“What I want, my dear, is to know what possessed you to call me out. Precisely, if you please -I’d like to note this for posterity.”

The world was dark and spinning, and Ingrid felt dizzier and dizzier as she struggled to right herself and figure out where up and down were at the same time. The more the struggled, the worse it got, until she was seeing doubles and triples of things, until this dark, cold world became even more surreal. Faint glimmers of gold, old and half-hidden under layers of darkness and dust, swirled at the edges of her cobwebby vision, and just trying to catch a clearer image made her eyes hurt.

Her heart rate was through the roof, she could hear her pulse hammering away in her ears as she squeezed her eyes shut.

“Oh, don’t worry. The disorientation will pass in… oh, about an hour.” The voice reassured her with a smug lilt to his voice. She could hear the smirk. “But you won’t be here that long.”

Ingrid forced herself to open her eyes, to look at whoever was talking to her, but then she saw those _eyes_. The same ones she had seen – had thought she had seen- in Maddy’s room, oddly luminous in the dark and reptilian-flat.

Fear spiked in her gut, a sharp, sickening sensation that closed around her throat and churned in her belly and then—

Ingrid awoke in a cold sweat, gasping air greedily, like a runner who had just finished a marathon.  Her heart was like a kick-drum in her chest, trying to break out and run away, and her limbs trembled with adrenaline.

The boring white plane of her ceiling had never been a more welcome sight.


	7. Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mistakes are made.

 

The day Ingrid moved into her own apartment, she had hoped that the dreams would stop.

This hope wasn’t spawned by anything in particular – rather, it was the vague and dim hope that a change of scenery would fix things. Her therapist had suggested doing that several times now, after all. Ingrid figured she should probably give it a try.

She moved into an apartment of her own, near a coffee shop downtown, and bought an orchid to liven the place up a bit. She bought a dream-catcher, too, though she was a bit sceptical about those. Some people swore by them, though, so maybe it would help.

Maddy was excited to help her big sister move, contrary to Ingrid’s expectations. Instead of being upset or distressed, the little girl insisted on helping to pick out things like throw cushions and such. Dahlia gave her eldest daughter a bouquet of orchids and roses and lilies as a home warming gift, and Peter helped move in the new furniture.

As soon as they were gone, Ingrid regretted moving out. This apartment was cold and plain, devoid of the character and warmth of her childhood home. Financially, it wasn’t a bad idea; Ingrid could afford to live on her own, could supplement things with a job of some sort, could always visit her little sister…

“Well, too late now.” Ingrid murmured aloud to the empty apartment, slipping her hands into her jean pockets and surveying her new home. Give it a little time, she thought. It’ll warm up and get better eventually.

Irrationally, the ex-medic contemplated running out and grabbing some stuff for a sweet-grass ceremony. One of her fellow medics moonlighted as something of a shaman, or something along those lines. He’d always insisted on doing a sweet-grass and white-sage gig every time they moved to a new site – to keep the place ‘clean,’ he’d said.

…Barnes had been hit in the face by a piece of shrapnel from an IED, two weeks before their tour ended. Some stupid bastard with no training and a hero complex had thought he was helping when he pulled the shard out of Barnes’s head in a panic…

Ingrid squeezed her eyes shut against the memory and stayed liked that, standing in the middle of her living room, until she was sure she could open her eyes and see her apartment, and not some desert wasteland with blood all over the sand.

The eldest child of the Olesson-Price family counted breaths until she felt her heart-rate slow and the sickening anxiety in her belly die down.

Her hands shook, and Ingrid cast her eyes about for something else to focus on.  

The place was small, but not cramped - large windows, open spaces between the kitchen and the living room. There wasn’t a direct path from the front door to the bedroom, and only a few corners that would trigger her habitual paranoia in the dark. She’d just put bookcases in those corners or something. Maybe a potted plant.  She’d have to look into that. Later, though. Not now. Right now, all Ingrid wanted to do was sleep. Taking the sleeping pill had been an absent-minded action, something her waking mind barely acknowledged doing. She just wanted to _sleep_.

Just one dreamless night – that’s all she wanted.

Just one.

…But, of course, the dreams came again.

* * *

 

“Let’s try this again, shall we?”

It was the same voice as before – clearer and closer- and Ingrid could feel cold stone beneath her, pressing against her cheek, her shoulder and side, her hips and knees. The world was grey and full of shadows, no less disorienting than it had been the first time…

But somehow this dream felt more solid. More real.

More like it was actually happening.

Old marble archways and bridges and walkways convalesced into something that almost looked like a courtyard, barren of anything green. Two chairs were set there, opposite of an old-fashioned and inky-black wooden table. The chairs were winged-back, like in the movies, and made of darkly-stained leather with brass studs and clawed feet. In the gloom of this place that couldn’t possibly be a place, she could have sworn she saw the claws of the chairs’ feet tap the ground in a slow, rolling wave. The quiet scrape of metal on cold stone could easily have been a trick of her mind, but for the fact that she heard it more than once. One of the chairs, the one facing her, was larger and more imposing than the other – gilded in broken patches that seemed like they faded in and out of shadow without pattern. The other was smaller, plainer, and far less ostentatious.

Her skin _crawled_ , as it always did when she dreamt of this place, and a chill swept over her even as Ingrid pushed herself off of the floor she had been sprawled upon.

How odd, she thought distantly, to be aware that one was dreaming while still asleep.

 Hesitantly, Ingrid approached the set up in the centre of the lifeless courtyard, instinctively distrusting the shadows that moved back as she approached and closed in on the spaces she vacated behind her.

She was wearing her uniform – the khaki desert camouflage and stiff boots and gators as familiar as her own face. Her hair was back in a tight and conservative bun, her beret resting just-so. The weight of her dog-tags clinking quietly around her neck, something which had once been a comfortable weight, suddenly felt like a slowly tightening noose. She looked down at her hands, feeling something tacky and hot, and saw them dripping with blood, splattering droplets on the stone below in violent splashes of colour.

Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe – couldn’t breathe for the weight of those tags and the way they were weighted down with the tags of ever fallen soldier she hadn’t saved- couldn’t breathe for the _guilt---_

As abruptly as the fear had closed in around her, it was gone, and there was a figure in the larger chair – his clothes so black that they were nearly indistinguishable from the shadows that fell around him.

Ingrid was no longer in her uniform, no longer suffocating under the noose-like weight of tags that were not there. Her hands were white, devoid of the rivulets of blood that had stained them just moments ago… The change was sudden and added to her disorientation, her sense of imbalance, but to her credit, the woman did not stumble or falter as she continued, however hesitantly, to approach the figure.

“Rather considerate of you, taking that sleeping pill.” The figure continued, and Ingrid couldn’t quiet see his face from within the shadows that fell over the chair he was seated in. Occasionally, she thought she saw a glint of light around where she figured his eyes must have been. “Though I thought you’d gone off them.” –here, Ingrid swore she could hear a smirk in the figure’s voice- “Too many _disturbing_ dreams and all that.”

A long-fingered hand surfaced from the shadows Ingrid finally came alongside the smaller of the two chairs, so pale as to have a grey-ish colouring. Ingrid thought she saw claws as the hand gestured for her to sit, and a numb feeling spread in her belly as she wordlessly complied.

The leather was cold and stiff, creaking quietly under her weight, though the sounds were loud and echoing in the cave-like place. Suddenly, puzzlingly, Ingrid wondered if she and this figure were underground.

“How astute of you.” The voice commented wryly, as if plucking the thought from her very mind. “Now, shall we begin?”

Licking her lips nervously, unable to explain to herself why she was suddenly so nervous when her mind reassured her that this was just a dream, Ingrid found her voice. “Begin what?”

Ingrid hadn’t noticed the papers and the inkwell on the table before – had they always been there? It was hard to think, hard to remember anything with the fog that hung over her mind, and the more Ingrid tried, the worse it got. Pain blossomed between her eyes, a slow and dull ache, as the woman tried harder to remember anything about her surrounding before she had approached the stone courtyard… but it was useless. Everything was a blur.

“Oh, the usual formalities.” The voice said dismissively, and that same pale and claw-like hand pushed what looked like some sort of contract across the table towards her. A dry feather quill, antiquated but strangely fitting, was placed beside the contract by the figure’s other hand.

The paper was thin and aged, like papyrus, like tissue-paper, and the script was strange… but Ingrid found that the more she stared at the strange characters and symbols, the clearer they became in her mind. After a moment, it was almost as though the contract had been written in plain English… despite the fact that Ingrid could quite clearly see the alien writing scrawled in a spider-like hand.

Puzzlement warred with wariness and curiosity, all three factions of her mind vying for control. Her curiosity was something she’d been born with, something which had gotten her into as much trouble as her deeply ingrained sense of wariness from later in life had kept her out of. The puzzlement played Switzerland in the conflict.

The words were long-winded legalese, unclear at first but still decipherable, and Ingrid thought to herself that this was an unusually detailed and well thought out dream, if the legalese was any indication.

A tiny, niggling part of her mind whispered that maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t a dream at all. Maybe it wasn’t even a nightmare.

Maybe…

Ingrid focused on the contract. There was a term that popped up continuously, a strange name that bothered her – as if it was terribly important, vitally so, but she just couldn’t connect the name to anything she knew.

_“The Nightmare King_ , _who will be referred to as the Agent_ …”

Three simple words, a solitary title, but they spawned a cold dread in her she just couldn’t explain.

Unbidden, Ingrid’s eyes drifted down to the heart of the contract, to the words which set the wheels and cogs of her mind into a flurry of motion.

‘ _…will henceforth assume the Nightmares previously allotted to one Madeline Olesson-Price by the Agent upon affirmation of this agreement, with the understanding that this contract cannot be rendered null and void and will only cease to apply to the parties in question when the time restriction, being six Mortal months after the date of the initial proposal, has been exceeded.”_

_“Additionally, the Questor may be subject to visitations from Nightmares not previously allotted to the Quester or the individual Madeline Olesson-Price, as the Agent sees fit.”_

As with most legalese, the sentence was ridiculously long and complex, and it did nothing to ease the anxiety that had been slowly unfurling in the pit of her belly. The feeling only worsened as Ingrid looked up from the papers before her and saw that luminous eyes hovered above claw-like fingers pressed into a steeple… and the shadows _writhed_. Anxiety twisted into horror, fear because she _hadn’t_ been imagining things, because those eyes made her flinch and want to curl in on herself. The mind-numbing terror she had experienced before did not come, even as Ingrid felt herself taking a sharp breath, steeling herself against the expected onslaught… but there was nothing. Nothing at all.

The two watched each other in a silence that was almost painful, until Ingrid couldn’t help herself.

“I had no idea you were called the Nightmare King.”

The words slipped out of her mouth carelessly, her tone somewhere between awe and hesitant curiosity, and even as her brain caught up to her words, Ingrid wondered at how seriously she was taking this dream of hers.

The Cynic in her nattered on in muted tones about how this was how her mind had rationalized her sudden increase in nightmares and restless sleep, inventing impossible scenarios in her sleep.

But the Believer was in genuine awe… and fear.

 “Few do,” The thin and long-limbed figure commented dryly. “Even fewer of those are quite so _old_.”

Ingrid had the sneaking suspicion she was being insulted… or possibly examined like an insect under a microscope. It had hard to tell; both possibilities evoked the same feelings of anger and alarm. Her ‘host’ of sorts was hardly helping, still veiled in shadow and unreadable. It was odd… fear and alarm had made her hyper-aware of her surroundings, of the stale air’s faintest of currents, carrying the damp scent of earth and old stone with it, for example, and the flecks of silver in the eerie golden-yellow eyes before her. Irrationally, she thought of an eclipse.

Suddenly desperately wanting to change the subject without really understanding why, Ingrid abruptly said, “You could have ignored me. Why didn’t you?”

She gestured to the neatly stacked, whisper-thin papers and tried to ignore the thrum of her pulse in her ears. The ex-medic may not have been subjected to the all-encompassing terror like before, but fear pulsed in her blood with adrenaline, settled in her lungs with her breathing, crawled along the skin of her arms and along her spine… A baseline fear, she ventured; her instincts were not screaming at her, not driving her away to claw for an exit with fingers and nails, but they were awake, alert, and coiled tight in preparation for a trigger.

The thin and long-limbed figure seemed to consider the question for a moment, hardly the span of several heartbeats, and Ingrid sensed a puzzling reluctance to answer from the other.

“Forgive me for believing you were _serious_ when you claimed to want to take your darling little sister’s nightmares for her.” The voice drawled, his tone hovering somewhere between deliberately baiting her and carrying a touch of irritation.

Despite herself, Ingrid felt a spark of irritation kindle at the edges of her nerves, and the woman plucked the quill from the desk with almost child-like petulance.

“Ink?” She asked brusquely, eyes tracking and finding the neat little line left empty for her signature.

“No need,” The Nightmare King answered, and the amusement in his voice set her teeth on edge. “It’s a rather… special quill.”

But Ingrid’s hand was already moving, and her name was written in ink the colour of blood.

There was half a second where Ingrid didn’t notice a thing, having simply assumed that the quill had some tiny ink cartridge in its shaft. There was half a second where Ingrid felt no regrets whatsoever. That half-second was brutally short-lived when she felt skin split of its own accord, parting in surgically smooth lines at the very base of her wrist and along her forearm, a horrible mimicry of her own signature laying her wrist open and letting loose a flood of red. The ex-medic gave a cry of alarm, dropping the quill to clutch at her wrist – feeling sick as hot blood spilled out from between her fingers and over the back of her hand- and the contract was smeared with blood.

“As I said.” The yellow-eyed figure commented mildly. He seemed completely unfazed by the mess of pooling and spattered blood – indeed, if anything the Nightmare King was watching the way the parchment of the contract gradually became stained a darker and darker shade of red with a strange sort of satisfaction.

Her mind was racing with thoughts of ruptured blood vessels and blood loss, and her panic rose like a tidal wave as Ingrid frantically tried to stymie the blood flow. Some rational part of Ingrid’s mind knew that the amount of blood she was losing was ridiculous –unrealistic, even- but the panic had seized her and that small part of Ingrid was ignored in the face of stronger survival instincts and training.

It seemed that the harder Ingrid tried to save herself, the more horrific the injury became. Deep but clean lacerations became jagged tears, severed tendons and ligaments and bones scored deeply with fragments of her name – cuts so deep the bones could clearly be seen to begin with- and the medic in Ingrid saw something she could not fix, could not save for all the tools and expertise in the world and then—

And then it stopped.

She did not wake, but suddenly the bloodied mess of her arm was gone – vanished before her eyes- and she was left clutching her arm, unmarked and unstained, with her heart in her throat and her pulse roaring in her ears, and…

The Nightmare King seemed… different. Ingrid hadn’t noticed it before, the strange almost-insubstantial quality of the figure before her. Now that it had changed, she realized how wraith-like he had been – barely tangible and more shadow than being.

It was not so now. The figure seemed more solid now, more _real_. Bloated; the word flitted across Ingrid’s mind. Bloated on fear.

“A pleasure doing business with you, my dear.”

Even his voice seemed more substantial, hanging heavier in the air like the thick smoke of incense where before his words had been wisps and whispers.  She could see the ember-glow in the uncanny yellow of his eyes, in the flat, fish-like silver, too, devoid of anything human behind them.

Dread did not even begin to touch upon the thing unfurling in her belly, even as the world began to fade away and cold relief of escape swept across her.


	8. Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And it begins...

 

A month on, and Ingrid was convinced she was losing her mind.

It had been rough, at first. It didn’t matter if it was day or night; whenever she slept, even if it was just a quick nap, the nightmares plagued her. They were more and more vivid, more visceral than they had ever been. Sometimes, she awoke convinced that she would open her eyes to a vista of sand, with the harsh light of the sun feeling _so very real_ until the moment she realized it wasn’t. Sometimes, she awoke to the smell of blood lining her airways like smoke and ash. Sometime, she felt the bullet wound in her side –long since healed over and scarred- as if it were fresh and new and flowing freely, and it would take hours until she felt normal again.

But there was something worse than all of that. The nightmares, horrible as they were, Ingrid could have dealt with eventually. Dream or not, she’d made a deal – if not with the figurative devil, than with herself. She’d get through this like she’d gotten through everything else – by gritting her teeth, keeping her head down, and taking one step at a time. It had served her well in the desert; it would have to do at home. No, there was something much, much worse than the desert nightmares and the blood and the screams in her sleep.

It was the things that she saw when she _knew_ , knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she was awake.  

Ingrid saw impossible things. She witnessed figures with distended limbs and too-sharp teeth stalking the streets at night, twisted and beyond any recognition as human. She saw things that should not _exist_ – that couldn’t exist- curling around children’s windows and slipping under doors. Things with razors for teeth, and coals for eyes; things with claws and limbs that didn’t move properly, joints that bended every way but the right way, and yet were impossibly fast. She saw creatures that seemed only half-human, or half-humanoid at least, and even that seemed a loose description when they turned their flat, unfeeling eyes towards her and watched her as she moved down the street.

Even in the daytime, she saw them. She saw _things_ in the waters of local ponds and rivers. She saw them behind windows and in stairwells, lurking and watching, but never doing anything. She had witnessed a creature reaching withered hands with yellowed claws to the nape of a child’s neck, only to shriek at something Ingrid could not see and flee in a flurry of unseasonable ice and snow.

They saw her, too. Ingrid was sure of it, as insane as it sounded even to her own mind.

A half-man with goat eyes tracked her progress when she ran along the local jogging trails, stood at the crossroads of the many trails and appeared again at the edge of the forest when she fled – and all the while Ingrid felt hunted, like an animal on the run. A wispy thing barely more substantial than fog at night and with eyes that made Ingrid’s skin crawl brushed past her in the stairwell of her apartment building, and Ingrid could have sworn she smelled decaying flesh. Things with yellow eyes watched her from the underbrush in parks and parking lots.

The more she saw them, the more they seemed to grow aware of her – until one evening she opened the front door of her apartment building to find them gathered there, watching her in the dark with hungry eyes.

Something like hysteria had seized her, had frozen her limbs and closed like a vice around her throat, as she stared in horror and bewilderment at the things with bandied legs and slavering jaws, at how they crept around lawn ornaments and hedges and prowled. Something in the dark hissed and gurgled, and the coppery scent of blood reached her nose, more like a punch to the face than anything else. Her blood had turned cold in her very veins, had sent sickening chills down her spine and roiled her innards, even as her heart hammered against her sternum and her lungs refused to work.

It was the fear of the hunted, where instinct ruled all, and Ingrid’s instincts had driven her to flee – to take the stairs two at a time and bolt her front door and windows shut. Even as she berated herself for her foolishness, she turned on every light, her fingers fumbling the locked case where she kept her gun, and shaking hands loaded it. The air in her apartment felt stale and suffocating, almost too thick to breathe, while her heart-rate skyrocketed and her pulse thrummed loudly in her ears. Every muscle in her body was tense, coiled to fight or flee, and her fingers nervously tapped at the safety of her handgun.  Lights flickered, her breathing hitching with every half-moment of dimness, her heart frantic in its attempts to escape or fail her entirely.

Something was scratching, long and agonizingly slow, at her front door.

Her hands were slick with sweat, shaking and slipping even on the textured grip of her weapon.

Her training had prepared her for many, many things – but not this. Nothing like this.

Ingrid’s mind scrambled frantically for anything, any fragment of information at all, that could help her – that could explain what she was seeing. Everything from hallucinations to psychotic breaks was uncovered, the Cynic in her panicking in the mundane confines of its neat and tidy little world… but the Believer… Oh, the Believer in her had some theories. Mad theories – desperate, wretched things that crawled from the recesses of her memory like the very creatures that had frightened her.

Fragments of folklore, tiny fractions of myth and legend, surfaced, describing the things she had seen and what she was hearing, even as the Cynic in her denied everything. Childhood memories of research and fascination, of tomes upon tomes of stories filtered through the back of her mind, even as her fear grew.

 But fear could have strange effects on people. Sometimes, they cowered. Sometimes, they fled. Sometimes, fear broke a person.

…Sometimes, it just made them angry, like some bitter resentment bubbling from the depths of a person’s soul, frothing until it overflowed and something snapped.

“Stop it!” Ingrid shouted, forgoing all rationality even as she trained her aim on the windows of her kitchen – the more fragile of the two, between the front door and the window. Even as she knew, in the rational, cynical part of her mind, that bullets couldn’t hurt something that _wasn’t real_. “Stop it! Just go away!”

And that was when all of the light bulbs in her apartment burst.

It’s funny, how something as simple as the dark can turn fear into sheer, mind-numbing terror. 

 “ _My_ , you’re not taking this very well at all.”


	9. Nine

 

“ _My_ , you’re not taking this very well at all.”

The scratching at her door and the hissing whispers at her window stopped, suddenly enough to leave a vacuum of silence in their wake. All she could hear was the thrum of her blood and her own breathing, shaky and uncertain as it was. The darkness closed in about her, half comforting, half-suffocating in its closeness.

Something brushed against the back of her neck – against the hairs already standing at attention there- and set her nerves even further on edge than they had been. Ingrid flinched, even as her eyes struggled to adjust to the sudden absence of light. She knew that voice – she knew who and what it belonged to…  She’d just never expected to hear it outside of her dreams.

“It’s hardly their fault, you know.” The voice continued conversationally, and Ingrid couldn’t pinpoint its origin. Every word seemed to come from a different direction, and that grated against her already frayed self-control.  “You’re practically _inviting_ them.”

Slowly, she lowered her weapon – suddenly, even having it out of its case seemed unbelievably stupid.  What precisely had she meant to do with it? Fire random shots and attract the police? Everyone would think she was having some sort of psychotic break – if not worse!

…Hell, maybe she _was_ having a psychotic break.

Swallowing, finding her mouth dry and her voice reluctant to respond to her mind’s commands, Ingrid licked her lips and asked, “How’s that?”

Ingrid didn’t know what would be worse for her, a psychotic break or all of the things she had seen actually being real. On the one hand, she’d be put in a padded room and probably drugged out of her mind until she was “fixed” by some quack or another. On the other hand…

“It’s your fear they want,” The voice answered, sounding almost pleased with itself as it interrupted her train of thought. He, Ingrid supposed. The figure always seemed male when she dreamt. “Well, _most_ of them.”

Something scuttled under the windows, the sound like scrabbling fingers struggling to find purchase in the brick and mortar façade of the building – or claws.

Anxiety settled low in her belly, nauseating and spreading along her nerves, tensing muscles further and raising the hairs on the backs of her arms. Adrenaline had hit her system well before then, but the effects were still going strong; her hands trembled and her heart beat wildly behind her layers of flesh and bone, and every sense seemed to be more attuned, more sensitive to the slightest shift, the slightest change in her environment.  She could smell things she normally ignored – could detect the scent of ozone and musty old books, alien to her home, and the dampness of oncoming rain. The barest shift in the air currents around her sent goose-bumps tingling along her skin, and every creak and moan of the old building seemed earth-shatteringly loud in the silence of her darkened apartment. For all that Ingrid new the heaters in her apartment were on and functioning, it felt like she’d left all of the windows open in the dead of winter. Even her breath seemed to condense into a thick, rolling fog before her, just barely visible in what little, dim light there was from the streetlights below.

The darkness had a texture – something soft and shifting like smoke, just barely there but for the way her senses were set to overdrive. Her muscles thrummed with her blood, coiled and ready to _move_ , not caring how or where to or in which direction, and suddenly it seemed almost unbearable to remain still any longer.

Something shifted and displaced the air beside her, and something sharp and just _barely_ there skimmed over the flesh of her shoulder, following the natural curve to the nape of her neck. Ingrid struggled not to flinch, and felt furious when she failed – it seemed too much like a sign of weakness to her, even if this all was in her head.

“Why are you here?” Ingrid forced herself to ask, keeping her voice firm and even despite her trembling hands and the way the adrenaline in her veins made her want to run and run and never stop running.  

She couldn’t see those eyes, but her instincts were strong, and they told her that he -or it, or whatever she was supposed to call the thing- was there.  For now, at least, she was going to treat the situation as though it were real – she could sort out whether or not it was some sort of psychotic break later.

“I think you’ll find I have something of a standing invitation.” The voice commented drolly, and Ingrid nearly cursed at how close it sounded – barely a few feet away, and she hadn’t even noticed a shift in the air. Could creatures such as this one even affect the physical world like she did? Did they displace air like regular people?

Ingrid frowned… something niggled at her memory, beneath flashes of blood and bone and darkness. She wondered if she had seen that in the contract she’d supposedly signed – wondered if she could remember anything else beyond the horror and the gore.  Without really thinking, she said, “Rules as written, then?”

The phrase was something some of her friends had used, back in the Forces. Some of them had been big on table-top games and RPGs… funny, that she would remember that just then. Her mind was making connections, intuitive leaps that her rational side couldn’t quite follow.

“ _Well_ , _well_!” The voice seemed to be coming from a particularly dark corner of her apartment, near the window in the living room. It sounded… amused? No, nothing so light-hearted. There was something not-quite sinister about the humour in the voice’s tone. “A _satyr_? He must have followed you home from the forest.”

The ex-medic blinked, surprised. “How did you-?”

“I exist wherever fear exists.”

Ingrid had a sudden flashback to her jog in the forest, how no matter how fast she ran or how hard she listened, she felt like she was being followed – hunted, even. She remembered the way she had felt fear creep like a spider along her spine, had felt something instinctive and primitive tell her in no uncertain terms to _leave_ and never, ever come back. Cautiously, the woman stepped over to the window the voice had originated near and pulled the sheer curtain aside.

Nearly a dozen sets of eyes gazed up at her from the dark, clinging to the places the light from the street lamps couldn’t reach. They reflected what little light reached them, like a cat’s would, shining unnatural colours from the shadows.

Ingrid grimaced – both at the eyes and the creeping feeling that came over her, as if someone were standing directly behind her. She honestly couldn’t tell which was more unnerving, even as she felt her shoulders grow tense under the scrutiny. “Will they ever leave?”

The voice chuckled, but it wasn’t an especially comforting sound.

“Well?” Ingrid demanded, suddenly angry and frustrated and still goddamn _terrified_ by the things that were happening. She could only be frightened for so long before her temper got the better of her – something that had served her well during her time in the military.

Silence was her only answer. 


	10. Ten

 

When Ingrid dreamt that night, she dreamt of running. She dreamt that she was trying to catch something unfathomable, something light and warm and safe. She dreamt that she was being hunted down like an animal, and the darkness was only ever half a step behind her, no matter how fast she moved.

She dreamt she was a deer, strong-limbed and fleet, with a pack of wolves snapping at her heels, trying to wear her down until she couldn’t even stand. She dreamt that she was a hawk trying to catch a wiry hare, a sly thing forever eluding her talons by fractions of inches no matter the break-neck speed at which she plummeted from the sky.  She dreamt of doors in strange houses being beaten and broken down, of unfamiliar corridors which never led anywhere safe, and the shadows chased her every step of the way.

The worst of the lot were the dreams of the desert, left alone in the dark with bullets flying overhead and no sense of direction. She could not tell which side was hers or where she was; only that the shouts and footsteps were getting closer, and she didn’t recognize any of their voices. She wasn’t stupid, she knew what happened to female combatants when they were captured – everyone knew, they just tried not to talk about it- and she couldn’t _breathe_ for the fear—

Ingrid woke with a cry, her heart hammering violently in her chest and her lungs starved for air. Sweat had dampened her clothes and her sheets and had set her hair to clinging to her face and neck in oily tendrils.

 The air was so thick with the reek of her own perspiration and fear that the redheaded woman could barely stand it.

Her limbs were sluggish and heavy, even as the ex-medic staggered over to her bedroom window and flung it open. Cool, crisp air rushed in to meet her, caressing her face with intangible hands and trailing over her shoulders; the pre-dawn air was damp and heady with the scent of freshly fallen rain and damp earth. It was still dark out, false-light only barely creeping over the horizon ahead of the sun, just barely tinting the sky in hues of yellow and pink and blue.

Chilled now, the dampness of her skin feeling clammy and cold where before it had been too warm and suffocating, Ingrid retreated further into the room – she didn’t need to glance at the vanity mirror in the corner to know she looked like hell.  She _felt_ like it.

Her dreams hadn’t been especially frightening, at least not at first, but they left her feeling deeply perturbed.

Something shifted behind her, a quiet rustle of fabric that broke the silence like a scream.

It spoke volumes of her fatigue, that Ingrid only jumped a little as she spun to locate the noise.

She could have sworn she saw something, could have sworn in every direction in any court that she saw eyes in the space beneath her bed. Just for a moment, just barely – but when Ingrid blinked, they were gone, like a trick of the light.

The redhead swore, too tired to make the oath particularly emphatic. “I must be going insane.”

* * *

 

It was easy to become bloated on this new brand of fear; the woman had an abundance of it. It was not as wholesome as the terror of children, not as simple. A child’s fear was potent and heady; an adult’s was like an aged wine, subtle and complex in comparison. No, her fear was a myriad of things, bitter and sweet and touched with a darkness that only existed in adults, thick as syrup and richer, too.   

It was the fear of a grown Believer - something entirely new. It had the headiness of a child’s terror, laced with the bittersweet fears of adulthood and faintly, oh so very faintly, sweetened by a shred of true, honest Belief. A woman-child, fully grown but for her persisting Belief…

It had been so long since someone had Believed in him.  Fear alone could sustain the Nightmare King, but Belief was what he thrived upon. It was the different between rations of bread and water and a banquet, and it took so little effort for him to coax out the truly deep-seated fears.  She had so many, had seen so much –

And even now, she had another, newer fear – a fear of madness, of losing her grip on reality. It was sharp and had an acidic tang, and while not wholly pleasant it was something Pitch could cultivate and refine. Her subconscious was filled with barely budding horrors and insecurities, it was such fertile ground. Enough to gorge upon – enough to sate himself for quite some time- and leave only numb apathy in his wake…

But the Nightmare King had learned to be cautious. One mortal did not a bounty make, and he was forced to bide his time and regain his strength in light of his recent defeat at the hands of the Guardians. They would be monitoring the children of the world closely, watching for signs of corrupted dream-sand and his familiar old tricks.

None of them would think to watch the adults... and why should they? They were the Guardians of childhood, after all.

Adults were fair game.


	11. Eleven

She didn't know how she’d gotten there – how her tentative venture beyond the walls of her apartment had led her to the pond. She and Maddy had played there with the other neighbourhood kids, once; Ingrid had been the “adult” supervision, despite being only a handful of years older than the group.

The Bennett family lived nearby, Ingrid remembered vaguely as her boots found purchase in the cold earth and damp grass. She wasn’t sure which direction their home was, couldn’t summon the information from her memories.

Things looked a little different than what she remembered. The trees were taller, the houses nearby more numerous – some were a story or two higher, too. The pond itself had always been a quiet place in the bustling little town, a brief stretch of space between roads and lots that edged on a forest. The late fall weather had turned that forest into shades of scarlet and amber, vivid and stark against the pale blue of the cloudy sky above. The forest floor and the surface of the pond’s still waters were littered with fallen leaves, and the earthy-sweet scent of decaying leaf piles was heady on the wind, under the smell of wood fires and damp earth. It was fall but already a touch of frost was upon the air, lending it a crisp quality that fogged her breath and nipped at her bare hands and face.

Something about the clearing, with its muddy earth and still waters, comforted the ex-medic. It was so quiet, and it felt so oddly separated from the rest of the town – as if the noises and smells of the town were somehow miles away…

Ingrid couldn’t see a single thing there. Nothing watched her from beneath the water with crocodile eyes. Nothing skittered between tree trunks and rustled or disturbed the leaves strewn about. The strange figures with inhuman limbs and terrifying eyes were nowhere to be seen, in fact. For the first time in over a week, Ingrid felt almost… safe. Some of that constant anxiety that had thrummed along her nerves and inside her belly eased and she could feel the tense and tender muscles of her shoulders relax just slightly. Slipping her hands into the pockets of her jacket, the red-haired woman sighed, billowing humid clouds in the cold air about her.

There wasn’t really anywhere to sit comfortably in the little clearing. Most of the earth was muddy or near frozen, and Ingrid couldn’t see anything else that could serve as some form of ledge or seating. It was a shame, really; she would have liked to try meditating there, sometime. Maybe she’d bring a mat next time.

Her week had been filled with research and near-daily raids upon the local library. She’d been scrambling, initially, to find information on the things she had seen, had felt; she’d borrowed everything from psychology textbooks to case studies on hauntings and books about crystals. It hadn’t been until she’d cracked open a tome of myths, legends, and folklore from around the world and had noticed certain trends that Ingrid’s search had become focused and defined. She began taking notes as she read, drawing diagrams to show the common threads and ideas between the different regions and traditions; pages upon pages had been filled, painstakingly neat and organized. The ex-medic had taken all of the information she could find, cross-referencing everything she found with other sources until she was sure she had something solid. She had drawn up pages of symbols with detailed explanations written beneath, their uses and origins and cultural context, and then had organized them based on their intended purposes.

The world she had touched upon as a child with her love of myths and legends grew before her very eyes as she delved further and further into the materials she found.  Soon Ingrid found herself filling multiple notebooks with notes on everything from modern witchcraft to bind-runes and herbs and stones. She’d learned a lot from her research – even the online stuff. She’d learned how to use salt to ward off spirits, how to burn white sage to clear her home, how to draw bind-runes over her windows and her door to keep evil out. Sure, some of it sounded absolutely nutty – but the rest of it? The rest of it had at least some tenuous ground in the myths and legends she knew like the backs of her hands.

…But none of it kept the nightmares away. She’d tried, had even made a dream-catcher from scratch and hung it over the head of her bed. It was no use. The Nightmare King and his creations were unaffected; coming and going freely as if she hadn’t burned enough sage to make her eyes water not hours before, as if she hadn’t placed lines of salt on the windowsills and doorsteps.  

Standing invitation, indeed.

Hours must have gone past without her mind taking note of them, because when Ingrid finally withdrew from her thoughts her hands were nearly numb with the cold and the sky had gone dark. Shadows stretched long and languid over the slopes of the earth around her, scaling trees with spidery hands and tracing the edges of her own shadow. Alarmed, she cursed, the apparent suddenness of the darkness upon her disorienting the ex-medic.

A familiar chill ran up her spine.

“You look _dreadful_.”

Ingrid felt her jaw clench, her already stiff shoulders tense painfully as she couldn’t quite stop herself from speaking. Withdrawing a hand from her pocket, she gestured curtly to the dark bags under her eyes,  asking, “Admiring your handiwork?”

“Hardly.” The voice dismissed her, and Ingrid found herself straining her eyes, trying to locate a glimpse of those eyes or a shift in the darkening shadows surrounding her. She was too chilled, too numb with the cold to really detect any shifts in the air about her, but the hairs on her arms stood on end nonetheless.

Something cold and sharp pricked her scalp, like claws passing through her hair as the breeze tugged at her locks. The sensation set her teeth on edge.

“Feeling brave, are we?”

The words came from different directions – a favourite party trick, as far as she could tell- and Ingrid was left with the distinct and unsettling impression that she was being circled.

Ingrid grimaced before she could think to mask her expression, and as a mirthless chuckle resounded in the clearing something occurred to her. In many of the myths she had read up on, honest and direct dealings often had the best results… in addition to doing the unexpected; most heroes survived by doing what every other person before them had been too greedy or too afraid to do. Ingrid may not have been a hero, but she figured maybe, just maybe, the legends might be onto something.

“Not particularly.” She found herself saying, and she surprised herself by unconsciously drawing on her pervasive, if somewhat self-depreciating, sense of humour. “Honestly, I wouldn’t mind being walked home right about now.”

Some small part of the ex-medic was convinced that she’d gone mad, but that part was growing smaller and smaller with each notebook filled, with each book borrowed and returned. Knowledge was power, in more than one sense of the word, and even if she had only scraped at the surface of things, what little knowledge Ingrid had garnered gave back some tiny portion of her sense of control. It was a small, precious thing, but it was empowering, too. It was a hand-hold in a world where suddenly the horizontal was vertical and the vertical was on another plane entirely.

The figure seemed to materialize before her, shadows condensing and forming solid shapes, and the eyes that Ingrid had searched for were watching her with a calculating and just faintly puzzled look… For the first time, she could see the slopes and planes of his face, the curve of his Grecian nose and the sharp hollows of his cheeks, the thin lips and strong brow.  His face was pinched and alien, exaggerated in some respects and downplayed in others, and as was the body that bore it; long limbs, just slightly too tall and thin to pass for human, and difficult to discern from the shadows about him. He seemed to wear a robe of some sort, though if it bore any further details than that, Ingrid’s eyes could not make them out.

Oddly, she felt no fear. Anxiety, yes, but not true fear – not the fear that cracked at a person’s resolve, at their sanity, and broke them down into so many little pieces. She watched him watch her, and something a little like calm settled over her, heavy as one of her grandmother’s quilts and comforting, if in a cold way.

It was the sort of calmness that fell over her when she waded through bodies, picking out those who lived, those who could be saved, and those who could only be made comfortable until their passing. The little things fell away from her, adrenaline beginning to seep into her bloodstream, and suddenly her focus became that much sharper.  It was not the adrenaline high she had experienced in her apartment a week ago, with her jumpy nerves and twitching hands, but rather a feeling of being in the eye of a hurricane; she saw what happened around her, but none of it touched her – not yet.

God, it was cold out.

“If it’s all the same to you,” Ingrid began cautiously, slipping her hand back into her pocket. “I’m heading home. It’s freezing.”

The figure said nothing, merely continuing to watch her with gold-and-silver eyes from the dark. Awkwardly, Ingrid nodded – to reassure herself, to say goodbye, who knew?- and stepped back before slowly turning her back on the Nightmare King. She found her shoulders tensing again, expecting something, _anything_ , but…

Nothing. Nothing happened. She’d expected irritation, perhaps, or anger at her easy dismissal. Hell, she’d even expected amusement of some sort… but no. The too-thin figure didn’t seem to react at all, silently watching her retreat with those uncanny yellow eyes.

It didn’t frighten her, not really, but something heavy and uneasy, slick like oil and thicker than molasses, settled low in her belly. On impulse, the woman glanced over her shoulder, and found the lean figure still there, half-cloaked in shadows at the edge of the pond, like some terrifying sentinel in the night. She felt her weight shifting as her disquiet grew, felt her steps falter and then stop altogether, even as she _knew_ it was well past time for her to get home behind her barriers of salt and runes.

Unbidden, she thought he seemed… lonely, almost.

Ingrid shook her head and started walking again.

Maybe she really _was_ going insane.


	12. Twelve

Sometimes, Ingrid wondered at how readily she armed herself against the things that shuffled in the shadows about her, with their grasping fingers and leering eyes. It worried her, in a small and distant sense, that she so easily slipped into that sort of frame of mind.

If anyone had seen her gear, tucked into the little pockets inside her jacket or else hung from a belt-loop by a carabiner, they might have taken her for a window washer, or some sort of hair-dresser. The small spray bottle bumped against her hip in a steady rhythm as she moved down the sidewalk, its contents sloshing gently with each step. On the opposite was a fixed-blade knife in its leather sheath, rough and hand-made by an old-high-school friend in his forge. It was good steel, with simple leather wrappings around the hilt and a fine edge to the blade itself. Tucked into one breast pocket on the inside of her jacket was a small packet or iron shavings – and, god, the strange looks asking for _that_ had gotten her almost weren’t worth it.

The messenger bag that hung across her body from one shoulder partially concealed the knife’s dark-leather covering, and contained a large container of run-of-the-mill salt… and a large handful of the little salt packets one usually found at restaurants and fast-food places. There were a few other things tucked into the canvas bag – a notebook, a few pencils and pens, a lighter, and possibly the world’s most compressed survival kit crammed into a thirty-two ounce plastic water bottle.

Ingrid had debated on wearing something like a pentacle or maybe a crucifix, but had decided against the idea as a whole; from what she understood, those things only worked if you really, truly believed in them. Having never been particularly religious, Ingrid figured they’d be fairly useless to her, even with all of the good intentions in the world behind her actions.

Sturdy boots that were maybe a little too similar to her old military-issue combat boots carried her from the paved walkways of the town center to the muddy earth of the forest once more, thick-soled with deep tread patterns. Probably not the sort of shoes she should wear to her therapist’s office, Ingrid thought to herself with a grimace. That woman seemed to take particular glee in pointing out old habits and asking uncomfortable questions.

“At least I haven’t made a bug-out kit.” Ingrid muttered to herself, shoving her hands into her jacket pockets and steadfastly ignoring the figures that danced in her peripheral vision. 

Not a full one, anyway. It sort of doubled as a disaster survival kit, and it lived in a large rucksack under her bed.

…Yet another thing to avoid mentioning to the therapist.

Ingrid didn’t have any particular goal in mind as she stepped under the thinning boughs of the forest; she hadn’t really intended to even go to the strip of land on the edge of Burgess that day… but something had nagged at her to do it. It was a gut feeling of sorts, a strange certainty that she would find something worth seeing if she went on a stroll and just happened to go in the forest’s direction.

Thus far, Ingrid had only managed to draw a small the attention of a few of the creepy-crawlies lurking about the town. None of them had really gotten close to her, but they trailed behind her in the way that a coyote might – watching and waiting for an opportunity, but not outright aggressive just yet. The sun was bright in the mid-morning sky, and the creatures seemed to be driven to the shadows by the light; yet another thing Ingrid had observed and noted in her studies.

The further Ingrid moved into the forest, the quieter it became – the din of the town became muffled and distant, just barely audible over the rustling of leaves in the breeze and the trickle of water nearby. When the ex-medic paused to listen, she could have sworn she heard something else, though… something soft and just barely there above the wind, like some strange music that haunted the spaces between the trees and the shadows under the fallen leaves.

It… pulled. Ingrid couldn’t think of a better way to describe the sensation; she could only barely hear it, whatever it was, but she felt compelled to seek it out, to find the source. Even as her rational brain began to question the sense and safety of wandering without tracking her location and relative location to the town center, the sound seemed to brush those petty things aside and filled her with a silent compulsion to move forwards. Even as the creatures trailing behind her hissed and gurgled, louder than they ever had before, and then seemed to disappear one by one, Ingrid could not bring herself to turn back, to return to the rural town of Burgess and retreat to the safety of her apartment.

The red-haired woman’s mind grew fuzzier and fuzzier as she moved further and further into the woods, until she could not see the edges of the town when she forced herself to turn and look. A pang of anxiety spiked in her belly, in that moment, only to be smothered like all of her other worries and fears by the half-heard music.

Words, more whispers on the air than anything else, began to lace themselves into the music, in a language unfamiliar to Ingrid; nearly guttural, but also soft, with strange vowels and odd consonants clustered together. Gaelic, her mind supplied, if somewhat tentatively.

Ingrid almost didn’t notice the clearing at first, the way the thickets and trees parted into a natural grotto of sorts, its canopy still heavy with dying leaves, blotting out the darkening sky…

Was it really already evening? Ingrid found herself puzzled by that, even as her mind grew clouded and her thoughts seemed thick and too heavy to carry for long. Where had the day gone? It had been nearly noon when she had left…

Hadn’t it?

And then, the questions and their answered stopped mattering quite so much, because in the middle of the clearing was quite possibly the most beautiful creature Ingrid had ever seen. That the creature happened to be a man had absolutely no bearing on the adjective - and that should have set more than one internal alarm off in Ingrid’s mind as she found herself stepping into the grotto, found herself unable to help herself when the figure smiled, as though he’d been expecting her, and she felt her own face flush uncharacteristically. His hair was long, curling and dark, wet from the water and framing the high cheekbones and narrow face like a masterpiece in a gallery. Some strange part of her wanted to run her fingers through it, to touch that wondrous face with its long and stunning features. His eyes were like the dark spaces between the stars, deep and cold, and Ingrid could have stared at them forever. Droplets of water tumbled down the planes of his broad shoulders and chest, and they caught the starlight like diamonds.

…Starlight? Ingrid flinched, feeling as though she were coming back to herself from a long ways away, only for the music and the words to grow louder and more insistent.

The scent of damp earth and an oncoming rainfall grew headier, dizzying and threaded with something cloyingly -sickeningly- sweet, but the ex-medic found herself breathing more deeply anyway. The sweetness clung to her sinuses like car exhaust, lingering like a physical coating, and Ingrid almost gagged on it; it was the rot of waterlogged decay, of mould and dead water, paraded as a perfume.

The figure extended a hand towards her, and the fact that he stood waist-deep in the still waters of the grotto’s pond did nothing to lessen the pull she felt – if anything, the sensation seemed even stronger. Ingrid found herself approaching despite herself, her own hand reaching out-

His smile was too wide, some part of her realized. It had started off small, but that part of her mind was growing and clamouring for attention now, frenzied under the layer of suppressed panic and suspicion.

Immediately, the thought was smoothed away, almost belligerently. She was imagining things. Of course she was. She was just so tired – what harm could there be here, so close to home, if she stayed for a while? The grass was soft, and the forest was dark and deep; she could rest without dreams here. No more nightmares, no more waking up in a cold sweat in the small hours of the morning…

His teeth were needle-like and sharp, that same part of her mind shrieked with growing distress.

That wasn’t important. Nothing was important. All that mattered was joining him, there in the water. All that ever mattered was the smiling, handsome man with eyes like starless nights. The grass was soft, and the forest was dark and deep; he would show her somewhere safe to rest.

There were water-weeds in his hair.

 That wasn’t important. He just wanted to help her sleep – what did it matter if his hair was a little unkempt? The grass was soft, and the forest was dark and deep.

Her boots sank into the mud at the edge of the pond, larger and darker than the one at the edge of town, and the water rippled as the mucky earth shifted beneath her weight. She reached forwards, some part of her unwilling to take that final step into the water no matter how strong the pull became, but the smiling man did not move to meet her. His smile fell, slightly, as though he were disappointed, and Ingrid felt an irrational need to fix that, to make that frown disappear from that beautiful visage and never let it return again.

She was being rude, trying to make him leave the water. What did it matter if she got a little wet? It was just water, wasn’t it? What a silly thing, to be afraid of water. It wasn’t even cold – she could see that for herself, if she wished. There were safe places, here, safe from bad dreams; all he wanted to do was show her. The grass was soft, and the forest was dark and deep.

Ingrid could feel her resolve weakening, wondering even as she resisted the pull why it mattered so much that she stayed on dry land.

So, naturally, that was when something decided to try to take a chunk out of Ingrid’s leg.


	13. Thirteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Yet another chapter for you! I also made a mix for background music while you're reading - I hope you enjoy it!  
> http://8tracks.com/indignantlemur/inexplicable
> 
> And, for those wondering, I also drew Ingrid for you guys, so you can get a better idea of what she looks like!  
> http://fadinglightofglory.deviantart.com/art/Inexplicable-Ingrid-439640043

The creature was quick and nimble, wiry like a greyhound and quiet as a cat – Ingrid hadn’t even noticed its rapid approach, its rabbit-like hops and dog-like bounds. She hadn’t noticed a thing until it had already struck. The pain lanced through the fog in Ingrid’s mind like a bolt of lightning – sharp and clear and blindingly bright. It came out of nowhere, needle-like teeth burrowed into the meat of her calf like fish-hooks and setting Ingrid’s dulled nerves on fire. Adrenaline broke into her system like a tidal wave, as if every suppressed fear and anxiety was released from a dam all at once, and it left the ex-medic shaken and disoriented, even as she cried out and her leg gave way beneath her.

More frightening than the sudden attack, however, was the sudden and overwhelming rush of _clarity_. She fell hard on her side and shoulder, horrified at the visions swimming before her eyes as the enchantment shattered like so much glass.

Gone was the glamour of the scene before and about her. Gone was the beautiful figure with his charming smile and beguiling eyes. Instead, Ingrid found herself in a clearing of dead and dry grass, patchy and muddy and devoid of anything green and living. The bones of hapless wanderers, some so old as to be nearly dust and some so small that the victims couldn’t have been more than infants, littered the grotto like macabre lawn ornaments. Half-decayed bodies riddled the ground amongst the bones, and flies buzzed furiously.

It was the smell that was the worst, though – Ingrid was used to seeing death, but the smell was something no one ever got used to. The rotting smell she had detected before was a breath of fresh air in comparison to the thick and pungent stench hovering in the air.

The water of the pond – so clear and pristine before- was muddied and foul, and the figure within it became skeletal and gaunt. Even as Ingrid watched, half crawling half stumbling away from the water’s edge, the figure’s features grew alien and cruel, with long knife-like teeth elongated and rotten within their blackened gums.

The man – the thing she had thought to be a man- twisted, bones shifting sickeningly beneath his flesh until the figure resembled some unholy bastardization of horse and man, and it stared at her with open hunger. Its breathing was ragged and its hands were clawed now, talons cracked and jagged from abuse. The thing's joints cracked and bent at sickening angles as it moved towards the water’s edge, leering with equine eyes and slavering like a starving dog.

Ingrid cried out, forgetting the small, dark-furred creature that had bitten her in the face of something much more terrifying, and struggled to flee the clearing, tripping over the gnawed-upon bones of what must have been a child. Her leg was bleeding, and Ingrid could only barely put weight upon it, but adrenaline and fear drove her forward as she heard the fetid waters behind her sloshing. The ex-medic crawled forward on her forearms and good leg, hardly caring about the jagged wounds the shattered and broken bones beneath her caused as shock and horror blotted out everything else but the need to survive. That she could have dropped her bag and moved faster, could have used any of the skeletal remains about her as a weapon, didn’t even occur to the woman as the fear-frenzy took hold.

Wet, squelching steps staggered closer and closer, unshod hooves sinking deep into the mud behind her as the creature drew ever closer.  Ingrid’s heart was beating so fast and so hard that it might have burst from the exertion, her lungs became too shallow and too small in her chest, but worst was the fear and the way her skin crawled with greater and greater intensity as the creature from the pond approached, until the sensation was just short of agonizing.

She was so close to the edge of the clearing, so very close, but the distance seemed impossible, even as Ingrid’s instincts screamed at her to get out of there, to run and run and never stop running, but—

A clawed hand, or something that was supposed to be a hand, gripped her shoulder, puncturing through the leather of her jacket and into the flesh beneath almost thoughtlessly, and Ingrid couldn’t suppress the terrified scream that escaped from her throat as she was flung onto her back, the shards of bones digging in wherever they could.

The creature – a water-horse, Ingrid mind numbly supplied- hovered over her, needle-teeth bared and maw dripping with drool that burnt like acid when it touched her skin. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe for the fear that seized her, her hands fumbling for anything, anything at all, that she could use to defend herself. By sheer coincidence, one of her arms brushed against the bottle at her hip.

The idea clicked into place in the back of Ingrid’s brain, like a switch being flicked on.

The water-horse seized her other shoulder, raising her torso from the ground with seemingly no effort whatsoever, and Ingrid suddenly knew without a doubt in her mind that it would go for the jugular. It was hungry; it wanted a quick kill and an easy dinner. She wouldn’t get another chance.

The creature’s maw widened, its breath reeking of rotting flesh and fetid waters. It was as good an opportunity as she’d get. The carabiner, a cheap little thing, broke with almost no resistance, and Ingrid wasted no time in pulling the spray-trigger once the nozzle was pointed at the water-horse’s face.

The effect was almost instantaneous.

The water-horse shrieked, dropping his intended victim unceremoniously and clutching at its wounded, hideous face. Smoke arose from flesh that seemed to be almost melting away from the muscle and bone beneath. The sound churned the prone woman’s stomach, even as she forced herself as upright as she could make herself and continued to flex her finger around the spray-bottle’s trigger, sending atomized puffs of water towards the ungodly thing before her until it could barely stand. It was dragging itself back to the putrid waters of its too-still pond, and something grim and almost like triumph surged forward in her mind.  

Without really knowing why, Ingrid found herself snarling, “Holy water, bitch!”

The ex-medic didn’t wait long enough to watch the water-horse fully retreat into its shelter. As soon as it was far enough away from her, the redheaded woman forced herself to her feet and began to stagger away. She didn’t care what direction she went in, as long as it was _away_.  The small, furred thing that had bitten her was nowhere to be seen, and Ingrid was perfectly fine with that.

Hands still clutching the spray-bottle of holy water, Ingrid half ran, half staggered and hopped away from the sickly grotto, using trees for support when her injured leg failed her. It was too dark now for Ingrid to tell what direction she was going in, or even where she was, but none of that mattered nearly as much as fleeing. The forest was inky-black, the stars providing little to no light, and everywhere Ingrid heard strange and frightening sounds, spurring her onwards with yet another spike of terror. How long the woman continued to move through the dark forest, stumbling and falling over rocks and stray roots in her night-blinded state, carried solely by fear and rapidly fading adrenaline, was anyone’s guess. Ingrid moved until she couldn't move anymore, all but collapsing at the base of an old pine tree, shivering and trembling like a child in a storm.

The sensible part of her demanded that she create some form of shelter, that she find kindling and build a fire to stave off hypothermia. She had the kit in her bag – it wouldn’t be as hard as working from scratch…

But Ingrid just couldn’t bring herself to move. In the end, she curled against the trunk of the tree, nestled between ancient and winding roots, and prayed for the first time in her life that she would wake up in the morning.

Silver-gold eyes watched from the shadows, flat and reptilian and just barely tinged with curiosity.

A voice, unheard by anyone or anything but the forest itself, murmured, “Interesting.”


	14. Fourteen

 

When Ingrid came to, it was still dark. It had grown colder, an aching damp cold that seeped into her bones and made the exposed skin of her face and hands feel stiff and painful. Her limbs trembled with the chill, and her body ached. The bite to her leg and the deep scratches she had suffered had gone untreated thus far – and Ingrid could have kicked herself for her own stupidity, leaving open wounds exposed to the elements and who knows what else!

The amount of effort that it took to uncurl her body and pull open her canvas messenger bag was both embarrassing and worrying. She was in bad shape, or at least she felt awful enough to think so, but there was little she could do without a source of light. It took a few tries, but Ingrid eventually managed to pull out the large survival-kit-in-a-bottle affair out of her bag and unscrewed the cap. Some cautious digging about within the contents resulted in a tiny flashlight and a first-aid kit. A quiet click saw the flashlight’s bulb flare to life, and Ingrid finally managed to take stock of the damage done.

Her pant leg was soaked with blood from mid-calf down, the damp of it contributing to the cold. The punctures themselves didn’t look too big, from what Ingrid could see when she maneuvered the fabric of her jeans around. She’d have to remove her boot and get a better look once she got some sort of fire going. Her forearms weren’t pretty, but most of the damage was minor – scratches and abrasions, most of them shallow and already closed. The punctures in her shoulders were also shallow, and already scabbed over. From the looks of it, they hadn’t bled much. Still, everything needed to be cleaned out and dressed properly – Ingrid wasn’t about to take any risks, given the state of that nightmarish grotto.

In the meantime, Ingrid tucked the first-aid kit back into the survival bottle and pushed herself to her feet, wary of stiff muscles and as yet undiscovered injuries. From the looks of things, she was in milder end of the second stage of hypothermia. Too much longer in the cold, and she’d start rapidly declining into the more severe end of the second stage, if not entering the third stage.

Ingrid shuddered. Some people didn’t wake up again when they hit the third stage.  

It took a painfully long time for the ex-medic to collect enough kindling and wood, and purely by chance she stumbled across – quite literally, in this case- a slab of what appeared to be shale. It wasn’t perfect, but the slab would make a safer place to set up the fire than bare earth. Getting it back to her pine tree, however, was a bit of a trial; Ingrid fingers were nearly numb with cold now and bordering on useless. Starting a fire with the dried pine-needles and a pulled and stretched cotton ball from her survival kit was a frustratingly slow endeavour, too. Her hands were shaking so badly that it took her several tries, even with a little Swedish fire-steel kit, to produce any sparks. Once the sparks caught, however, the rest was surprisingly easy, so long as Ingrid was cautious and attentive. Her fine motor skills were all but negligible at the moment, but heat and food would help correct that, so long as she didn’t blunder.

It wasn’t long before Ingrid had a respectable little blaze going, if one a bit smaller than she could have liked, given how cold she was... Then again, given how cold Ingrid felt, the ex-medic was seriously tempted to try her hand at building a bonfire, which was somewhat less than practical. Still, even with the recent rains, the ex-medic didn’t want to risk a forest-fire - especially not while she was still lost in aforementioned forest.  Besides, exposing herself to massive amounts of heat with her hypothermic condition could actually make things worse rather than better.

It took more effort than Ingrid would have liked to admit, but eventually she built the small fire up to the point where she didn’t feel she had to worry over it constantly. Shuffling as near to the improvised fire pit as she dared, the redheaded woman set about taking apart her survival kit and tending to her injuries. She found some hard boiled candies in the mix of bits of equipment and tools – a quick sugar fix to help stave off hypothermia if ever there was one. They weren’t the tastiest things in the world, but Ingrid wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

As the sugar hit Ingrid system, she found herself warming up, if slowly, and her hands began to get some feeling back into them… though that part was actually more painful than the cold-induced numbness. Her nerves danced and tingled and burned with the recovery of sensation and blood-flow, making Ingrid’s work much slower. With painstaking care, the former medic set about cleaning the wound on her leg – the worst of the lot by far- and bandaging it as best she could. The antiseptics burned like nothing else, but it was a familiar burn; this was hardly Ingrid’s first injury. The punctures from the bite didn’t look like they needed stitches, small as they were, but they were deep and flushing each one with alcohol was torture. More than once, she had to pause to wipe tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket just so she could actually see what she was doing.

The rest of the injuries were easier to care for, overall – the ones that had already scabbed over with debris had to be reopened and cleaned out, but otherwise everything looked reasonably fine. As soon as she found her way back to town, Ingrid would check in at the local hospital and get whatever shots she needed. In the meantime, her priority would be surviving the night.  

Now that heat was no longer a problem, Ingrid had to focus on her two other priorities: shelter and water. A human being could survive for weeks without food and be more or less okay afterwards, but a few days without water could be and often was fatal. She had purification tablets and filters, but no source of water as of yet. The only one Ingrid had come across was… well, she didn’t plan on going back to that grotto, even if she could find it again.

With stiff limbs, Ingrid forced herself to move about and begin constructing some form of shelter from fallen boughs and branches.  She was fortuitous in that the area she had eventually collapsed in was more or less perfect for the kind of shelter she had in mind. The large pine tree she had settled under had a sturdy trunk and the roots had formed almost a natural bowl shape, laid bare as if the earth on one side of the tree had been lost in a land-slide. What remained seemed stable, and Ingrid was fairly certain the tree wasn’t liable to fall on her if she built up a shelter at the base of it. Her survival kit had enough in the way of paracord, or parachute cord, and tools for her to make something vaguely approximating an A-frame lean-to. If she did it right, she’d be able to carefully move the slab upon which the fire was seated and bring it into the shelter without risking serious smoke inhalation.

There were heaps of leaves and pine needles around for form an insulating layer on the ground, and more than enough broken pine boughs – or unbroken ones easily within her reach- to form a primitive roof. It would be cramped inside the lean-to, but that was actually a good thing, as far as heat conservation was concerned. The process of actually building the lean-to seemed to take forever, but the exertion helped to warm Ingrid’s core temperature somewhat. The end result wasn’t exactly a picture-perfect example of the sort of shelter she’d had in mind, but it would do for now. Her tools were really basic, and while she was slowly starting to regain something vaguely resembling a normal core body temperature, the night was still cold and carried the chill of the upcoming winter with it.

It would be stupid to search for water in the dark, even with her two other priorities seen to. Climbing a tree to get a better idea of where she was in the dark was equally foolish and twice as useless, unless she just happened to be close enough to the rural town of Burgess to see the lights. The ex-medic would have to wait until morning… and hope her leg could stand the strain of looking for water _and_ climbing a bloody big tree. Ingrid sighed, poking at the little fire with the charred end of a stick and listening to the quiet pops and cracks of the burning wood. The forest was quieter than it had been when she’d fled the grotto, filled with only the mundane night-time sounds she had grown used to over the years. It was strangely reassuring.

A twig snapped, loud as thunder in the silence of the night, and Ingrid was on her feet before she could even really think about it. That, as it turned out, was a mistake; her calf gave a sharp and terrible twinge, and Ingrid felt her knee buckle under her own weight, dropping heavily down onto the joint. The impact was jarring, and Ingrid had to bite back a noise of pain and discomfort even as one hand reached for the spray bottle of holy water and the other moved towards the knife at her hip. The ex-medic oriented on the source of the sound, a nearby bush which rustled and moved slightly as something within it moved. She felt the adrenaline hit her system, the suppressed horror that came with the thought that the water-horse might have followed her, and her heartbeat became a loud and rapid tattoo in her ears.

The small thing that peeked out from beneath the bush’s heavy brambles was no water-horse, though. It was small and darkly-furred, its nose twitching like a rabbit’s would as it scented the air. As a little more of the creature emerged, Ingrid recognized it vaguely as the thing that had bitten her in the grotto. The knife slipped from its leather sheath quietly, and Ingrid twisted her body to keep the light of the fire from glinting off of the blade.

“Go. Away.” Ingrid made a point of putting force behind each word, her expression closed and her voice harsh. She didn’t need another fight, she didn’t need any more supernatural things happening to her right now, and she definitely didn’t need to be injured _again_ while she was still lost in the woods. “I _will_ kill you if you approach.”

If she was lucky, it would magically understand English, turn right around, and leave.

The thing snuffled at the ground, and edged closer. Its ears were long and upright, like a rabbit’s, but much of its face was canine, with a long snout and a lolling tongue. Its body was like that of a whippet or a greyhound, lean and wiry, but its movements were more cat-like than anything. It watched her with fox-eyes, large and expressive, and hovered just on the very edge of her little encampment.  The fur that coated the creature was smooth, catching the firelight in silver tips and glossy shines.

Its eyes were bright and terrifyingly intelligent.

“Peace, warrior.” It said, and its voice was quiet and soft, like that of a child. “Peace, this púca means no harm.”

Ingrid’s jaw very nearly landed on the forest-floor, if only internally. Externally, the ex-medic could only stare at the creature. Very slowly, she asked, “You _what_?”

The creature shuffled forwards and sat, folding its hind limbs beneath it like a cat, and murmured once again, “Peace. This púca means no harm, mortal. This púca would share your fire.”

 Again, Ingrid could only stare. Her mind seemed to flat out refuse to process what was happening before her. It had handled water-horses and boogeymen and all sort of strange and horrifying things, but this rabbit-cat-dog-thing was completely out of the question, as far as the ex-medic’s mind was concerned. Worse, the damned thing _spoke_. As far as Ingrid’s brain was concerned, it was packing its proverbial bags and going on vacation; clearly, it was overworked.

“I can’t be hallucinating already.” Ingrid blurted out, and some part of her cringed at the whine in her voice. “I _can’t_ be.”

The creature tilted its angular head and simply offered, “This púca is as real as you are, mortal. Your mind is intact.”

If only Ingrid was as sure of that as this púca-thing was. 


	15. Fifteen

When Ingrid awoke in the hospital a week later, she had no memory – no solid, reliable memory, at least- of what had transpired between that night with the púca and the several days she had lost.

It had warned her about that. It had told her that something about its species affected the memories of mortals. Odd that she could remember its soft, mewling voice, could remember flashes of light and stars and the texture of smooth fur. If she strained herself, she could remember the sounds of nighttime creatures, the smell of damp earth and ozone, but nothing further.

Seven days. One hundred and sixty-eight hours of her life – gone. Ingrid couldn’t even muster up a vague memory of how she had come to leave the forest, or what direction she had come from, or anything of the sort. She tried and tried and tried until her head started pounding, until the buzz of fluorescent lights stung her eyes like wasps and the shuffle of footsteps beyond her door felt like hammers against her temples.

 It was beyond maddening, even when the redhead finally gave up on trying to remember anything significant.

The hospital had been just as she remembered it from her sister’s birth; cold, sterilized and somehow cavernous under the hum of fluorescent lights. The place reeked of chemicals and sickness, of overworked doctors and frustrated nurses. There were _things_ in the hospital, too, she discovered. Crawling, slippery things that hovered near the dying, that scuttled, unnoticed, along the scrubs of the doctors and surgeons and whispered in their ears. Ingrid saw them skulking around corners like insects, small and specialized in their prey and in their function. They weren’t like the creatures she had seen before, not quite as long-limbed and gangly; they were smaller, more insidious, and everything they touched seemed oily afterwards.

One of them had tried to crawl across her bed in the night, had tried to skitter up the stand supporting her IV bag (presumably filled with vitamins and everything she’d need to recover from dehydration) – and, well, Ingrid had put a stop to that.  The thing had been startled, terrified even, when she had swatted it off the side of the bed with her hand. It wasn’t used to being seen, to being touched, never mind being picked up and thrown across the room.

The creature fled and never returned. Its brethren only stared at her from the dark corners of her room, deep in the darkest hours of night.

Ingrid had been reported missing two days after her disappearance, or at least that was what Ingrid figured based upon what the nurses had told her and the timeline as she remembered it. Volunteers had combed the woods, the rivers, nearly everywhere they could but Ingrid had, apparently, left no trace of herself. The footprints they had found were hardly useable, and disappeared over a large patch of bare rock near a river. She’d staggered into town, covered in blood and dirt and barely sensible three days later, and had collapsed on some random person’s front lawn.

For the life of her, Ingrid couldn’t remember anything about a river or leaving the forest, either. She had been interviewed and questioned repeatedly, but could only haphazardly guess at the gaps in her memory. The bite on her leg had been dismissed as a failed coyote attack, the cuts and bruises the result of a bad fall, but it was her memory that puzzled everyone most of all. She hadn’t suffered any head injuries that could be detected, though it was possible she might have suffered a concussion as a result of the supposed fall…

Ingrid took advantage of the confusion and disappeared into her family’s custody for a few days while the fuss died down.

Maddy clung to her middle like a drowning man clings to driftwood. Her mother kept fussing over how thin and pale her eldest daughter was, as if seven days without food was a near fatal sentence. True, it hadn’t been pleasant (and Ingrid truly couldn’t remember if she had eaten, or what, or when) but she had survived worse before. Peter, her step-father, kept trying to bundle her in blankets until the former medic could barely move for the sheer mass of fabric that had been piled onto her.

Wisely, Ingrid had remained silent and compliant and had allowed her family to worry and wring their hands for a few days. It wouldn’t have been worth it to complain that she had seen and suffered worse, that she was fine and didn’t need to be fussed over.  Her family needed this, the fretting and the coddling – Ingrid understood that. It was part of re-establishing familial bonds, a sense of security and normalcy, and it was especially important for Maddy. Maddy had never lost a family member, not to divorce, or sickness, or even just a temporary disappearance. She didn’t know how to handle it.

It was a solid week before Ingrid was able to broach the subject of returning to her apartment without Maddy crying at the thought.

It was another week before her absentee biological father, Edward Klein, sent a postcard asking to meet up for coffee.

Her father still lived in Burgess, in the outer-most ring of the suburbs and a good distance away from Ingrid’s mother. The former medic’s biological parents had next to no contact now that child support and visitation rights weren’t an issue, but Edward’s absence at the hospital had been noted nonetheless.

Ingrid memories of her father were vague, and almost all of them were tinged with something slightly unpleasant. Perhaps some of that was her mother’s bias, but Ingrid knew a good portion of it was hers and hers alone. Edward had never been an especially kind man – successful, hard-working, and charismatic to a degree, certainly, but not kind. He hadn’t really wanted a daughter – had told Ingrid as much to her face once, back when Ingrid was too young to understand that her father was a brutally honest drunk. Worse than that, though, was the screaming and shouting that had followed when Dahlia had found out about that particular father-daughter heart-to-heart.

Fuzzy flashbacks of a man with a stern and disappointed face were Ingrid’s most common recollection of her biological father, when fighting wasn’t involved. He’d been more angry than hurt when she’d chosen, in a court of law, to live with her mother rather than him. He’d sent her postcards telling her about how much better she would have had it if she’d come to live with him, instead – softly worded and malicious things that Ingrid tore up and threw away before her mother could find them.

Since Ingrid had turned eighteen, the postcards and letters and emails had stopped, though she’d been ignoring them for a lot longer than that, if she were honest with herself. Dahlia and her family had ignored Edward and his doings, and vice versa, for years now and none of them were about to change that pattern.

…But now, suddenly, Edward wanted to have another heart-to-heart.

As much as the ex-medic wanted to be able to attribute the card as something a concerned, estranged parent would send… she’d seen too much and known too many people like her father to put much stock in that sort of thinking. Edward Klein had never once been a _concerned parent_ during her entire childhood, never mind her adult life. The red-haired woman suspected a ploy of some sort, even though her more rational mind couldn’t find a factual basis for the gut-feeling she had.

Briefly, oh so very briefly, Ingrid considered disappearing back into the forest again… but, no, she couldn’t. She shouldn’t. That would be craven and stupid, but though Ingrid berated herself for even thinking like that, her eyes gazed longingly over the canopy of trees that hovered at the edge of town.

 

* * *

 

As soon as Ingrid stepped out onto the café’s little patio and saw her father, Ingrid wished she’d just packed up her things and walked back into that damnable forest.

Edward Klein hadn’t changed much over the years. He still had a full head of pale blond hair and the same grey-green eyes Ingrid saw every time she looked in the mirror. His build was moderately thin, not particularly pudgy or especially heavily muscled. His features were sharp and stern, just as Ingrid remembered…  

And they were mirrored almost perfectly in the face of the young girl seated beside him. She was a slight thing, a young teenager maybe, with wheat-coloured hair and brown eyes. Dressed in slacks and a short-sleeved blouse, the girl looked like everything Ingrid hadn’t been at that age; prim and proper, for starters. Ingrid paused at the edge of the patio, only partially out of hesitation, and narrowed her eyes as she catalogued the young girl. She was fifteen, maybe, with bright, intelligent eyes; modest jewelry, earrings and what looked like a plain bracelet; nothing outlandish or extravagant or even remotely in the vein of the stereotypical rebellious teenager.

Fifteen. To be close to that age, the girl had to have been born back when Ingrid had been nine – back when her parents had still been together… at least on paper. The realization stung, but faintly, like bruise being prodded. Her father had been cheating, then... or at least had moved on almost immediately.

That explained a lot, if that was the case.

It didn’t make her as angry as Ingrid thought it should have. She should have been furious, should have felt pain and perhaps even a touch of disbelief… but, no. Nothing. The righteous anger and bitterness just weren’t coming. Instead, the ex-medic just felt a sad sort of resignation, as if some part of her had expected this. It was the same feeling she had suffered when her father had finally walked out on her and her mother.

The pair hadn’t noticed Ingrid yet. She could still leave, could go back to her quiet little apartment and scribble in her notebooks. She could turn around and walk away… but, no. It felt too much like cowardice to Ingrid.

 _Coward_.

The word chaffed. She had survived the Middle East, had stood strong under the weight of the survivor’s guilt and the nightmares; she had faced down a water-horse and survived, albeit barely; she had called out the goddamn Nightmare King and struck up a deal with him. She felt fear, but she was not ruled by it. It drove her, sometimes, had fueled desperate attempts to survive and even to kill, but those instincts did not control her… Not often, and not for very long, at least.

Ingrid was no coward, not as she understood the word.

The cast-iron-framed chair scraped loudly against the concrete floor of the patio as she approached and pulled a seat out for herself.

Edward and the girl jumped. They hadn’t noticed her, and Ingrid felt her medic’s game-face slip on over her features like a mask; the tranquil and collected face she wore with perhaps a touch of compassion in her features when she had been faced with those beyond her skill to mend. It was a face which betrayed no worry, no sorrow or regret, only soothing and reassuring calm. When she spoke, her voice would likely reflect her mask – it always did when she wore it.

Five minutes. She could manage that.

“Ah! Sarah, this is your half-sister, Ingrid.” Edward’s opening salvo was boisterous cheer and enthusiasm, all big smiles and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. “Ingrid, this is my daughter, Sarah.”

Ingrid nodded, and offered her hand to the girl. She didn’t say anything, only offered a small smile to the girl and seated herself. Both of them had already ordered drinks for themselves. The girl, Sarah, watched her with open curiosity. Ingrid could see the uncertainty; the way the girl wondered how this new half-sibling would react to her, the fear that Ingrid would be angry or resentful. She could understand that.

“Look at you,” Edward was saying. “All grown up! We heard you’d gotten lost in the forest.”

How proud he sounded – as if Ingrid being successfully raised into adulthood by a single-mother was something he thought he should be proud of.

“How old are you?” Ingrid found herself asking Sarah, watching closely as the girl with the wheat-blonde hair flicked an uncertain glance towards their shared parent. “Fifteen?”

Four minutes.

Sarah nodded, and she seemed to want to say something, but… Well, Edward happened.

“Nearly ready to head off to university and become a lawyer!” The man was nearly fluorescent with pride. “Sarah’s the top of her class, you know – and she was bumped up two years because of those smarts of hers.”

Ingrid ignored Edward. She wasn’t really interested in what her estranged father had to say, didn’t feel like giving in to the temptation to feel replaced and slighted by the man who had once told her that he had never wanted her in the first place. It hurt, in a faint and far away sense, but most Ingrid just continued to feel tired and vaguely sad.

Sarah looked uncomfortable, like she wanted to speak but felt certain that she’d be shot down as soon as she tried. Ingrid knew that look, knew that feeling – she had felt it often as a child under Edward’s care. There was something about the curve of the girl’s shoulders, though, like she was curling in on herself… and away from Edward. A red flag.

Three minutes.

“Oh! There’s my wife! Late, as usual!” Edward suddenly announced, and Ingrid felt irrationally annoyed at the thinly veiled and forced fondness in his voice as the man stood up to retrieve his new spouse. A glance across the open space of the patio and into the parking lot revealed a woman with curly blonde hair the colour of honey, curvy and freckled and small in stature, wearing a race-car red sundress.

In the gap between Edward’s commentaries, the ex-medic offered a kinder expression, something gentler and warmer than her neutral mask, and made a gesture to encourage the girl to speak.

“Dad said your mum wouldn’t like it if we came to visit you when you were in the hospital.” The words were quiet, soft-spoken, and tinged with regret. Too soft-spoken, Ingrid observed with narrowed eyes. Too quiet, too mouse-like. The girl kept her eyes downcast, for the most part – shyness, or something else?

Her mind started pulling together the subconsciously noted clues, the ticks and the hints and the gut-feeling, carefully compiling information and drawing cautious conclusions.

Ingrid shrugged. “His absence was noted.”

Sarah shifted uncomfortably, as if tensing for a blow only to catch herself and try to cover it, and Ingrid felt a strong impulse to reach out to the girl. Living with Edward hadn’t been easy for her, and she wagered it probably wasn’t easy for Sarah either. It can’t have been, not if the tentative conclusions she could draw from the girl’s manner and appearance were any indication.

Two minutes.

“If you want to talk sometime,” Ingrid began, trying to find the right words. “Without… your father… I’m easy to find.”

Sarah nodded vigorously, surprising the elder of the two, and looked like she wanted to say more, but… well; Ingrid’s internal timer was nearly up. Maybe it was a flimsy excuse, but it didn’t stop the medic from scrawling a phone number and address discreetly on a nearby napkin, folding it, and pressing it into Sarah’s hands.

One minute.

Making a point of looking her other half-sister in the eyes as she spoke, Ingrid offered, “If you ever need a place to stay, for any reason, my door’s open. Any reason at all.”

The words came out more gravely than she had intended, but done was done and she was already pushing her chair out and collecting her things.

“What do I tell them?” Sarah looked alarmed – not that Ingrid was leaving, but rather that she’d have to explain it to Ed and his new darling wife.

“Tell them I got a call from someone who sounded upset.” Ingrid offered after half a moment’s thought. “Tell them it was an emergency.”

Forty seconds.

Ed and the woman in red were turning to face the patio now.

Ingrid turned away, only to pause, turn back, and belatedly offer, “It was good meeting you.”

And then she was gone, long swift strides carrying her out of the café. Past the harried baristas, past the lineup of customers and out through the back door, skirting the ghastly shades that crept along the corners of the trash bins in the back alley; she took the long way around the building and hopped on the first bus she saw.

Burgess was a small town – it wasn’t like she’d get lost on a strange bus and end up stranded.

(Ingrid pointedly didn’t think about the forest incident.)

It wasn’t until Ingrid had sat down on a cracked vinyl bus-bench and watched the nearly empty vehicle pull away from the sidewalk that she realized how tightly her fists had been clenched. Her nails had dug deeply into the flesh of her palms, red crescents of nearly-broken skin, and her fingers and knuckles ached when she finally relaxed and uncurled them.

Someone behind her chuckled, and the voice seemed entirely too familiar.

Ingrid turned to look at the seats behind her, despite already having surveyed the bus and despite knowing that the only people on it were herself and the driver. The shadows under the seats were writhing in the flickering fluorescent light, seeming to ripple like water and shift like sand at the same time in their movements. Her mind supplied her with fragments of dreams, with flashes of that stone courtyard from her nightmares – because, yes, that’s what they were; there was no sense in denying it now- and of luminous yellow eyes.

The lights of the back half of the bus flickered violently and then sputtered out, leaving one end of the bus illuminated in fitful bursts of passing traffic. The driver cursed, flicking some switches on the panel before him. Nothing happened.

“You can move up to the front if you want,” The driver, a middle-aged man with a baseball cap and a close-cut beard offered. “Looks like those lights are busted.”

Ingrid chose to settle back against her seat, forcing her muscles to relax. “It’s alright. I don’t mind the dark.”

The voice from the shadows behind her offered a disbelieving snort, barely perceptible over the sounds of the bus’ engine and the traffic that passed by.

“The girl was full of fear.” The Nightmare King commented, drawling amusement in his voice. His words were muffled, as if coming from far away. Something like claws ghosted over the back of Ingrid’s neck, setting a path of goose-bumps in their wake. “Tell me, will you be taking her nightmares, too?”

Ingrid ignored the barb, and fought the urge to brush away the itching sensation of rough sand against her skin. The hairs on her arms and the back of her neck were standing on end, as they always did when this figure, this creature, came around. Having her back turned on the Boogeyman set her teeth on edge, but turning to converse would have looked too strange.

“What was she afraid of?” Ingrid asked, her voice calm and curious as adrenaline thrummed beneath her skin, spreading through the blood-laden highways of her system. Her eyes and ears adjusted more acutely to the darkness, to the wisps of sand sliding with quiet hisses along the textured floor of the bus. Her sense of smell sharpened, too, detecting that oh-so-familiar and foreign scent of ozone and musty old books.

There was a long pause from the creature, the thing that called itself the Nightmare King, and then a languid drawl, “And what will you give me if I tell you?”

She clenched her jaw, dug her fingers into the edge of the seat with quiet creaks because the words had been whispered into the shell of her ear with a voice that rasped like sand over dry stone, and she knew without a doubt in her mind that if she dared to let go of her seat she’d damn near throw herself out of the nearest window to _get away_. The fear crept down along her spine like a poison, spreading in thin tendrils to wind around her nervous system and further the infection it brought with it. Her legs were restless with the desire to run, to bolt to somewhere bright and safe, her stomach leaden with dread, and suddenly the colours seemed brighter and sharper than they had ever been.

Fear is the mind-killer. Who had said that? Ingrid didn’t know, but she forced herself to think, to keep her grip both in the physical world and in her own internal one. Fear is the mind-killer because it takes away a person’s ability to think rationally, to examine a situation from all sides and decide upon a solution – it was the hindbrain’s desperate screaming instinct, something from the dawn of time that only knew of predator and prey and of running away to survive just one more day.

Gritting her teeth to keep the scream inside, Ingrid forced out, “You already feed on my fear. What else is there for you?”

The creature made an amused sound from somewhere behind her, not nearly as close now, and then the fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed, a sudden and violent shift in the world from Ingrid’s perspective that disoriented her and covered the hiss of retreating sand.


	16. Sixteen

The place was the same – always that damned place of shadows and stone, somewhere beneath the earth and far from the sun- and no matter where she wandered or what she did, Ingrid could not find a way out. Every time she found something that might lead to the world above, the shadows shifted and the stone gave way from beneath her feet, sending her falling and tumbling down.

It was a dream, of course. Ingrid knew because how else could she survive the sudden and steep drops, how else could she hit the cold, hard stone from such terrible heights and not shatter like glass? She felt no pain, suffered no harm – only a growing sense of frustration and unease.

“I’m surprised at you,” The creature that called itself the Nightmare King crooned from somewhere on a walkway above her. “Championing one sibling and neglecting the other. It hardly seems fair, really. What did poor Sarah ever do to deserve such a terrible sister?”

Ingrid grit her teeth, pushing herself to her feet and opting to try another path, or some other walkway. Eventually, she’d wake up. It was just a matter of time… but dreams could be funny when it came to the passage of time. A second in the waking world could feel like hours in her dreams, and an hour could be as fleeting as a glance.

“Taking her nightmares won’t solve the problem.” The ex-medic answered, her voice stiff with irritation.

A snort, from an entirely different direction now and much closer besides. “It worked well enough for dearest _Maddy_ , now didn’t it?”

Irrationally, stupidly, Ingrid wanted to punch him. It. Whatever the creature was. It was a foolish thought, and dangerous, but it soothed the spike of anger at the familiarity with which her sister had been spoken of. She wanted to snap, to say something snarky and sharp, but this was neither the time nor the place; not with her still dreaming, and in his realm besides.

“It’s just temporary.” Ingrid insisted as she approached a stone bridge, faintly illuminated in the dim and straining light that slipped through the cracks of the cavern’s walls. “I can’t take her nightmares forever – getting over that stuff is part of growing up. She’ll never manage it if I do all the work for her.”

And Ingrid honestly believed that. The nightmares of a child were nothing compared to the nightmares of adults, but Madeline would have to learn to deal with them eventually if she was to mature properly. It might seem horrible from a child’s perspective, but even Ingrid wouldn’t coddle her little sister forever.

A part of the ex-medic half-expected the Nightmare King to be angry at her, to threaten her perhaps, because even in her sleeping state she knew the expiry of her contract was at hand. Silver-and-gold eyes merely observed from the shadows, however, watching her progress critically as she pulled herself up along the craggy walls with her hands and feet until she could stretch and reach the stone railing of a bridge.

It occurred to Ingrid that she could hardly be the sole source of fear for the Nightmare King, even as she noted the emptiness of the cavern in what frail and failing light there was to see by. Strange, then, that the whole place seemed so undisturbed, ancient and let to molder in the dark. Surely there were other dreamers, like her, who came here?

Ingrid couldn’t answer that, not with the meager information she had at hand, but she wasn’t about to ask. She had more important questions to see to first.

“What is she afraid of?” The ex-medic asked for what felt like the umpteenth time, though in fact it had only been the fourth or fifth time she’d actually uttered the words since she had found herself in the Nightmare King’s domain once again.

The shadows shifted again, and almost too late Ingrid back-peddled onto a patch of stonework illuminated by the watered-down sunlight that crept through the cracks above. The bridge before her now cut off abruptly, and nothing but air remained where she had just been about to step. He’d done that a few times, now – tried to trip her up, to send her plummeting back down to the dark depths of the cavern he occupied. Ingrid didn’t like it down there, didn’t like the way it felt like dozens upon dozens of eyes were watching her from the shadows when she was so far from the light.

She stared out into the darkness, wondering where the creature that called itself the Nightmare King had wandered off to. She couldn’t see his eyes anywhere, could detect no shift in the shadows, no movement in the air… but, then, she could hardly expect this dreamscape to behave like the real world, now, could she?

“I can’t imagine why you think I’d tell you.” The creature’s voice commented, and not for the first time Ingrid felt compelled to stop and listen, really listen, to the textures and tones carried through the stale air. The silk-over-steel quality, the clipped intonations, the slow and languid cadence of the Nightmare King’s voice was actually rather pleasant to listen to… at least, it was in the brief moments she forgot who was speaking and what he was.

Ingrid found herself huffing an irritated sigh before she could stop herself, turning on her heel to head down the walkway she had just wandered up—

Only to draw up short when she came face to face with the Nightmare King.

He was just standing there, in a patch of faint light, with his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes half-lidded and reptilian in the way they watched and calculated. Once more, she noted the sharp angles of his face, the slope of his brow and the aquiline nose, the sharp jawline and the lean and wiry build of the creature. Trying to distinguish where the robes and shadows began and ended was an exercise in futility at best, so Ingrid didn’t trouble herself with it this time, letting her eyes linger over the strange and alien features before her. She hesitated to call him a person, or to even really apply a pronoun to the figure, when he was so very, very inhuman, but the English language just wasn’t designed to deal with that sort of thing.

Shiver of fear crept along her spine as her grey-green eyes met his – the baseline fear she was now so familiar with- and the ex-medic was quick to look away. Sometimes, in rare dreams, she could look him in the eye and suffer no consequences, but this dream did not have the makings of such an occasion. More often than not, eye contact resulting in the sort of terror that could fracture the mind, that had her waking with a scream that frightened her neighbours and had the landlord hammering on her door.

Anxiety swelled along with the faint beginnings of her fear, sweeping into the forefront of her mind and settling beneath her breast. It was a horrible feeling, something that could and would sicken and weaken her over time against the stress and the fear she would inevitably come up against. Even so, it was a comparatively pleasant alternative to abject terror. With that in mind, Ingrid kept her eyes focused on a point just over the Nightmare King’s thin shoulder, and tried not to notice the shadows shifting and writhing wherever she cast her gaze.

“Why do you want to know what the girl fears,” The figure drawled, head tilted just so, as if she were some strange and curious thing that had crawled out from beneath a rock. “…when you are so afraid of the answer?”

Ingrid felt her jaw clench, felt the anxiety rise further when she thought about Sarah, about the way the girl curled in on herself and how she just _knew_ something was wrong. The longer her sleeping mind lingered on the images, the more something like rage curdled low in her belly.

The anger was good – an antivenin to the fear, working in opposite directions, breaking the innate compulsion to flee… but it was also dangerous. It spoke to something too primal in these dream-spaces, something that didn’t care if it had to kick and scratch and bite to tear an enemy down, if she came out of the fight with blood in her mouth and caked under her nails. It was something from the dawn of humanity, something that exulted in the viscera and the thrill of conflict.

In the waking world, it was so deeply repressed that Ingrid never had to deal with that primal, animal aspect of herself. In the waking world, her impulse control was much stronger and the lines between good and bad were clearer.

“Fine,” Ingrid ground out, forcing the words through clenched teeth with what felt like far too much effort for such a simple task. “Don’t tell me. Keep your secrets. Three weeks and I’m done with you, anyway.”  
  
And, oh, how she looked forward to the end of her contract. Three more weeks and she wouldn’t have to keep coming to this not-place whenever she slept, wouldn’t have to fight against exhaustion and fear every waking hour. Three more weeks and everything would be fine. It wasn’t a bright hope, nor was it airy with the promises given to children – it was more like quiet resolve, a simple and straightforward sort of determination that this would be so.

And the Nightmare King plucked it from her mind without any effort at all.

“Is that what you think?” The Boogeyman wondered, his voice lilted with cruel amusement; she could hear the smile, Cheshire-like and too sharp to ever pass for human. “That our agreement will end and everything will be _fine_? That you’ll be _safe_?”

Irritation flashed through Ingrid’s mind, chased with stubborn denial. He was goading her. Of course he was, she thought, he benefitted from the contract. It made sense for him to try to trick her, intimidate her even, into entering into a new agreement. She wouldn’t listen, Ingrid resolved. She was done with contracts and boogeymen and stupid shadows.

“Of course, _dearest Maddy_ will start having nightmares again – but you’re expecting that, cruel thing that you are,” The Nightmare King commented dryly, examining the ends of his claw-like hands as if bored. The former medic refused to be baited twice in the same dream, even as her fists clenched and then relaxed.

Faintly, Ingrid could feel herself beginning to wake up – a softening of the edges of the dream, details escaping her as her body’s internal clock chimed and called for wakefulness. A few more moments, and she’d wake to her bedroom ceiling and her alarm clock shrieking. It was a comforting thought – just a little longer, just a little more.

The Nightmare King offered a sardonic, patronizing look as she began to fade out of the not-place that was his lair.

“I give you a week at best.”

It was the last thing she heard before waking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long delay! It's been crazy on my end - I'm engaged to a wonderful man, planning an awesome Viking wedding, working full-time, and trying to find time to reconnect with my original inspiration so I can write more. Hopefully the next chapter will come along a little more quickly!


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